


The Man Who Sold the World

by PrettyArbitrary



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: John in Afghanistan, Kink Meme, M/M, Time Travel, Timey-Wimey
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-10-16
Updated: 2013-06-24
Packaged: 2017-10-24 16:13:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 21,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/265440
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrettyArbitrary/pseuds/PrettyArbitrary
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If you remember getting exploded in 2010 and now it's 2007, does that make you dead, insane, high, or a time traveller?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The result of yet another [prompt](http://sherlockbbc-fic.livejournal.com/12432.html?thread=62126992) on the Sherlock kink_meme.
> 
> [The Man who Sold the World](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acvr_WJ9gfg) \- because linking David Bowie is never gratuitous. Though the same can't be said for that Ziggy Stardust image they pasted to that video. Just...listen, don't look.
> 
> If you're having trouble reading this on AO3, you can also find it on my writing LJ at <http://arbitrary_fic.livejournal.com>. Easiest way to find the whole thing is the 'series: man who sold the world' tag.

An impact like a full-body fist. The first air-splitting _crack_ before deafness drowned the full thunder of the explosion.

Bomb.

Sherlock.

 _Sherlock. Bomb._

Clawing his way up from the dark, John knew he was in flashback even before consciousness registered. Male sweat and desert dust and a thousand miles of ancient resin-laced wind washed the angry stab of chlorine from his sinuses. The heavy canvas cot supporting his body, the smooth weave of his fatigues pressing into his skin, were such bright points of sensation that it seemed only natural to find his old barracks when he opened his eyes.

  
But it was all wrong. He’d just been in an explosion. _With Sherlock. In London._ He did not have time to hallucinate. No one was coming to help them; he needed to find his flatmate and get them the hell out of the building before everything caved in on them. Machine oil and the endless white dust ( _cement dust_ ) coated his tongue in a bitter paste. He tried to concentrate on that, grasping for the flavour of ruined building and semtex beneath the illusion to pull himself out of this.

 _Ignore the men milling around the barracks. Ignore the laughter and hum of camaraderie. Ignore the bleached brightness of the Afghani sun._

He flinched back as fingers snapped in front of his face. “Hey, Doc, you in there?” Bill Murray leaned down, brown eyes crinkled with laughter. “You sleep at all last night? Christ, even I threw it in around 3 am.”

The man sitting on the next cot over snorted. _Dick Caville,_ John’s short-circuiting mind supplied. _Died a month before they shipped you home._ “Watson was on that poor fuck who found the IED till the sky turned light. Doing surgery on 36 hours no sleep and even the Colonel couldn’t chase him off. You saved that bastard’s life, Johnny, and no mistake.”

John smiled distractedly at him. Saving a life was always good, even if it was heading the wrong way from reality. No, no, goddammit, he could feel himself sliding into overload. _Get a grip, Watson! Not. Real._ “Um. Could you guys… I need to.” He made a vague motion in the direction of _outside._

“Shit, yeah.” Bill straightened up to give him room. Forcing himself not to hyperventilate, John squeezed past him and down the narrow aisle between the rows of beds.

He pushed aside the canvas flaps of the doorway and was slapped in the face by the familiar maze of gravelled alleys and barracks tents. A few lounging soldiers glanced up at him, startled by the look on his face, but they were experienced enough to recognize a personal freak-out when they saw one. He’d thought it would end at the entrance. Step outside back into reality. But there was more white dust, more army smell, more…

He broke into a run, gravel clattering beneath his boots, till he got out to a wider lane between structures. Camp Bastion. Helmand Province. February 19, 2007. He remembered the surgery Dick and Bill had mentioned. Colonel Burroughs had given John’s surgical team 24 hours downtime as a reward for nearly killing themselves putting a platoon back together after they’d been pulled out of an ambush.

But you don’t flash back to the day _after_ the trauma. For that matter, he hadn’t found it traumatic in the first place. Gruelling, yes, but he’d never revisited this in dreams, let alone in 3D surround sound.

He walked over to one of the huge shipping containers that lay sprawled everywhere around the base, pulled back and punched it.

Ow.

Alright, that was real. He looked down at his hands. Steady as bedrock. It occurred to him abruptly that his shoulder didn’t hurt. Not even the vague background awareness that it _could_ hurt if he pushed it, which had been there ever since it had healed.

Adrenaline? He queried his system. Panicking heart rate, respiration rate just shy of hyperventilation, razor clarity of perception, hyperawareness. Adrenaline and then some. But it was from confusion-fuelled fear; nothing like the consuming surge of a PTSD episode.

Bill came crunching up behind him as John was licking the abrasions he’d just put on his knuckles. “John? You okay? You looked like you were losing it.”

“Bill?” John turned around to face him, hating how small his voice sounded. “How do you know if you’re dreaming?”


	2. Chapter 2

Sherlock came to—misleading, it felt more like a change of state than waking up—hanging upside down over the back of the sofa in his old Bethnal Green studio. He was at a loss as to how he’d got here, or indeed how the place existed, but first order of business was incapacitating the intruder who’d just bowled him over.

He reached up to snatch the portrait off the wall, capitalizing on his lankiness to fold over and swing it into the man’s face. Hardly a fatal blow, but it got Sherlock clearance to regain his feet, at which point he could get considerably more drastic with the cheap metal frame.

Once he had his assailant sprawled unconscious across his rug, Sherlock crouched next to him for a better look. Remarkable. He was the spitting image of a blackmailer Sherlock had helped the police put away in 2007. In fact—he straightened up and frowned around the room—that fellow had followed him to his flat in Bethnal Green in hopes of ambushing him before he could hand over the final pieces of evidence to Lestrade. Sherlock distinctly remembered tipping backwards over his sofa and then bludgeoning his attacker senseless with the picture frame.

Evidence which was—he spun and strode over to check—right where he’d left it, inside the skull.

He glowered at the little envelope in his hands for a moment, before turning back to give the unconscious criminal a judicious kick to the head, just behind and below the ear. That’d keep him out until Sherlock…

…What?

Called the police?

Called John?

Figured out what the bloody _hell_ was going on here? Five minutes ago he’d been in the process of blowing himself, his best friend, and his arch-enemy to kingdom come. Now he was standing in the midst of a categorical impossibility: a flat that had burnt down three years ago. And yet, a single glance was enough to tell him that this wasn’t some complex reconstruction. Every detail was accounted for. The skull still lacked the char marks it would eventually gain. The scarf his mother had knitted him when he was 14, which he’d lost in the fire, still hung over the lamp nearest the door.

The door had the holes in its panelling from the time that enforcer from the Clerkenwell crime syndicate had tried to bludgeon it down with an iron poker.

“John?” Completely futile, of course, but one always felt ridiculous for overlooking the obvious answer. “John, is there any chance you’re here?”

Silence. No, of course not. That would be easy.

It didn’t feel like a dream. Sherlock always knew, on some level, that he was dreaming. The inconsistencies where logic didn’t quite square with itself were a dead giveaway. He supposed he could be in a coma. He didn’t feel like it—he assumed, not that he’d ever been in one before to have a basis for comparison—but he’d heard truly remarkable stories about the experiences of coma patients. If that was the case, then that was absolutely _fascinating_. He hoped he’d survive it and retain enough memory to write it up as a case study.

He could, he supposed, be dead. Though this made for a rather naff afterlife. He liked to think that if the supernatural had the gall to actually exist, it would at least take the trouble to be _interesting._

Unfortunately—he tapped the envelope restlessly against the knuckles of his other hand—regardless of whether he was in a bomb-induced coma or dead or somehow occupying a no longer extant flat, that still left the burning question of _what had happened to John._

“Dammit.” He reached into his trouser pocket—a cut he no longer wore—for his Blackberry—an older model in the same line as his current one, oh and look, there were the teeth marks from that ferret that’d used it for a chew toy—to call John.

Only it wasn’t John whose number was on speed-dial under “2.” It was Lestrade. Just as it had been at the time, at a number that was—in 2010—no longer in service.

It rang. Lestrade picked up. “Come get your criminal, Detective Inspector, before his drool does permanent damage to my carpet.”

He hung up on Lestrade’s predictably mystified vocalizations, and dialled John’s number in.

Not in service.

Sherlock stared at his phone like it was deliberately obstructing him. “John, where in _hell_ are you? Where in hell am _I?_ ”


	3. Chapter 3

The thought of stewing in his tent, surrounded by his fellow soldiers gabbing and faffing about, clawed at John’s throat. He needed somewhere he could think. With a population of thousands, military personnel and otherwise, Camp Bastion had no such thing as a quiet place, but he recalled some places where people would leave him alone. That was how he wound up sprawled on top of an empty shipping container, watching the burning blue horizon and wondering—not whether he was losing his mind, but how.

It was 2007, and he was a surgeon stationed at Camp Bastion in Helmand Province. It was 2010, and his life was wild with adventure and a magnificent madman.

The first thing John had done after remembering how to breathe—in, count, out, count, it still needed occasional tending to—was strip down and hit the showers, where he’d pored over every centimetre of his body in a desperate bid for clues. All was depressingly consistent: no bullet wound in his shoulder, no scars on his ribs from a motorcycle wipe-out outside Qurya in a September he hadn’t yet lived. The marks across his cheeks and shoulders from a case of sun poisoning two months ago (2007 time) hadn’t completely faded yet. They’d be—been?—long gone by the time of his discharge.

And yet, he remembered the smell of formaldehyde and sautéed garlic burning in the kitchen at Baker Street. He remembered the prickly scrape of Sherlock’s coat under his palms and cheek, a thin padding over the hard, living warmth of a man’s body.

Sherlock hadn’t been wearing his coat at the pool.

His mind felt like someone was picking the stitches out, patches of him falling away into disparate, mismatched lives. Inhale. He was in a coma, from a fucking _semtex vest_ he had been wearing five minutes previous to his loss of consciousness, and his mind was quite understandably confused about which period of his life it was meant to be inhabiting. Exhale. He’d taken an ill-advised sleeping aid after a stress-laden, sleep-deprived night in a surgical theatre up to his elbows in other peoples’ guts, and dreamed up a cartoon life back home with a beautiful caricature of a genius detective who was all the things the sane portions of his mind knew better than to want.

He couldn’t be dead. If afterlives were this rubbish, they wouldn’t bother having them.

Real or not, every fibre of his being _hurt_ with the force of his craving Sherlock. He needed the man’s logic. He needed to know if the man was okay. Never mind that if Sherlock were here, the question would be moot. Never mind that John would just pull those long wiry arms around himself and huddle into that warmth until Sherlock’s presence forced rationality upon the world and he woke up for real.

Girly image, that. But still tempting. He pulled himself back from the fantasy. Christ. How did a man cope with fantasizing about someone who may or may not be real? If Sherlock turned out to be a delusion, then how crazy would that make John for buying into it?

He grabbed his (short, military-cut) hair in both fists and yanked, seeking for focus in the pain. He had to get a grip. _Had_ to. John had 11 hours left before he had to return to duty, and Bill, chronic mother that he was, was already fretting over him after his initial episode. If this was real, then John was gunning for a court martial and sectioning if he returned to work this flaked-out. Worse, if this was real, his lack of attentiveness would end up killing someone on the operating table. But if this _wasn’t_ real, then…well, fuck, he had no idea what then. Skip back to England and hope that if he found Sherlock in his dream, he would wake up?

Maybe that was exactly what he needed to do.

Maybe he needed to relive this to get back to the point where he’d ended up.

Maybe this was his life flashing before his eyes, and when he finished, he’d die.

No. No no no nonononononono. It fell into a chant in his mind. John drummed his fists on the container in rhythm to it. He probably looked completely barking to anyone on the ground, but who cared? It drove back the screaming car crash of confusion in his head.

To hell with whether he was real or not. Sherlock was the most rational being John had ever known. _Use the method_.

If this was real, the consequences of acting otherwise were: sectioning; desertion; court martial; killing his patients.

If this was not real, the consequences of acting otherwise were: _who bloody well knew_ NO goddammit _focus_ they were…probably nothing. If this was not real, then he was lost in his own mind, and everything would wait for him to get to it. If he was dreaming of Afghanistan, then his mind seemed intent on walking through it step by step. A life he’d rather liked the first go-round, an ordeal he’d survived the first time, an experience that, all told, hadn’t been a total write-off.

It would do, he decided. It would do for a start. He could work from this while he gathered more information.

He jumped down into the dirt, knees flexing easily with the impact, and then toppled back against the container under the force of the third option.

What if they were both real? What if Sherlock was back in London right now, in 2007, chasing after criminals and doing whatever insane things he’d got up to before he met John?

 _Test the hypothesis,_ Sherlock said in his head. Yes. He might not be on par with his brilliant flatmate, but John was a scientist in his own right. Question. Research. Hypothesize. Experiment. Analyze. He’d figure this out.


	4. Chapter 4

It was February of 2007. Sherlock was in a not-yet-burnt-out building in Bethnal Green. He was watching Detective Inspector Lestrade, a few years younger and a little less grey, haul away a man who had just attempted to kill him.

Lestrade strode back in from the hallway where he’d been talking to a sergeant (not Donovan, she was still a Detective Constable). “Think that about wraps it up. Any parting shots before we clear out?“

Fire was such an unpredictable entity. It could destroy one side of a room and leave the other untouched. The tea mug in his hands was one of the things he’d salvaged from the blaze. John used it all the time. Try as he might, Sherlock could not get the facts to correlate.

“When did you hear from John last?” The question was either grossly anachronistic, and would leave Lestrade terribly confused…or it was not, and his reaction or lack thereof would give the game away.

The idea of time travel could hardly _not_ occur to him, but he’d relegated it firmly into the realm of fancy, barring impressive evidence to the contrary. Or the elimination of all other available explanations, of course. The key to deduction was to follow where the facts led, but he had to grant that it was toward the bottom in terms of likely hypotheses.

Well. Possibly a notch above ‘dead and in Heaven.’

“John?” No, that had only started Lestrade running through all the Johns he knew and trying to figure out which one was relevant.

“Oh, stop thinking, Lestrade. John _Watson_ ,” Sherlock clarified impatiently. “Short blond fellow. Army man, doctor. Helps me out on cases?”

Ah. It was to be anachronism after all. Lestrade gawped like the words coming from Sherlock’s mouth were Sufi poetry. “Did… Sherlock, did that bloke dose you with anything?” He leaned in, trying to get a closer look at Sherlock’s eyes. “You eat or drink anything he might’ve spiked?”

Sherlock stared him down, unblinking. Explaining himself would only reinforce the impression of insanity, even if he’d been inclined to waste the effort. Besides, in his head the words carried an unpleasant tang of self-justification. Lestrade’s explanation sounded all too plausible, and he didn’t like it.

A drug-induced hallucination. Possible. He was no stranger to drugs, would’ve sworn before a jury that he hadn’t been dosed, but…possible. Perhaps even likely.

Fortunately he could test that easily enough.

And as for the thin, frigid wire of dread that slid through him at the thought of John Watson being a figment of his imagination…well. He could test that too, though it might cost him something.

He lifted a hand from the mug to steer Lestrade towards the door with stiff fingers on his shoulder. “Never mind, you’re quite right. I’m speaking nonsense. Long night. Nearly strangled. Going to sleep now, goodbye!”

He all but slammed the door in the face of the long-suffering policeman, leaving him to linger in the hall wondering what the hell had just happened.

Sherlock made tea in the mug that John liked—it didn’t taste of him, the way it would in a few years—counting off enough time for the police to finish clearing off and allowing for a few extra minutes for Lestrade to tire of loitering about and fretting. Once he was certain that London’s finest had ceased to darken his door, Sherlock shrugged his coat on, swept up his mother’s scarf from the lamp and went out.

He walked to the nearest CCTV camera. Stretching an arm out toward it, he snapped his fingers twice and held up a hand next to his head, thumb and last finger extended in the universal sign for ‘call me.’ Then it was just a matter of waiting.

He felt humiliatingly slow. It had occurred to him while inhaling tea that in his last moments of awareness before the world gave up all efforts at making sense, he had been in Moriarty’s power. If there was a better explanation for this madness, he was hard-pressed to think of it. While it was, to the best of his knowledge, beyond the man’s ability to engineer something this sweeping, Sherlock couldn’t dismiss the possibility that he had found a way.

No matter what else Moriarty was capable of, however, he could not fake Mycroft.

Sherlock followed a meandering route through the neighbourhood, content to think and walk until a sign was given unto him. It didn’t keep him waiting long. He was ten minutes into his stroll when the phone booths began to ring.

“I need a favour,” he said upon picking up.

“A favour.” Mycroft’s voice was all polite surprise. Ugh. Him and his airs. As if they weren’t both perfectly well aware that he’d just shocked his brother out of his hideously expensive silk/cashmere blend socks. “From me. Do share, brother mine, what can I do for you?”

“I need you to find someone for me.”

“Someone you can’t find yourself? Sherlock, are you quite alright?” Now that, that was genuine concern underlying the delicate sarcasm.

It was _oppressive._ Good god, how old did he have to get before people conceded that he could care for himself? “I’m fine,” Sherlock snapped. “He’s military, you can do this more easily than I can, and I’m in a hurry. John Watson. A surgeon in the RAMC. Rank…” Actually, he realized, he wasn’t entirely sure. “Most likely Captain. Currently deployed to Afghanistan. Roughly speaking. I can track him from there if you find him.”

“Interesting.” Sherlock wanted to tell Mycroft how priggish that drawl made him sound, but unfortunately: _favour_. “You realize it’s an abuse of my power to go poking about in military records just to satisfy your curiosity.”

Sherlock rolled his eyes at the camera pointed in his direction. “Oh, please. You’re fishing for a return favour. As if this requires more effort on your part than picking up your phone and asking someone at the MoD to look it up for you.”

The silence was vast and dignified. There was no arguing with it.

“ _Fine._ ” He huffed. “I’ll attend your next hateful soiree, then. You can wave your elegantly bohemian younger brother under the noses of all those stiffs you have to pretend to like, and I’ll mock them so that no one else understands us. Satisfactory?”

“Not especially.” But it came accompanied with a huff of breath. Ha! He’d made Mycroft laugh. Or as close as he got to it, anyway. Victory was assured.

"Just think, _môn frère._ You're saving so much effort compared to the two weeks you’d spend chasing down security leaks after I blag my own way to the information." Sherlock smirked at the camera and hung up on him.

A notch over Mycroft and shortly an answer to what currently weighed in as life’s most pressing question. Triumph gave him an appetite. He recalled a tidy little cafe two blocks over which sold excellent pastries and their own coffee blends well into the night. It would shut down by the end of the year; best take advantage while he could.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1: Credit to ningen_demonai for the idea that Bill sometimes “unobtrusively asks how people are doing by inviting them out for drinks.”  
> 2: Tell me you don’t see it! “Take Me Out” - <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xZGcw9HHOkU>  
> 3: Quick glossary:  
> NCO - Non-commissioned officer. Sergeants, corporals, etc.  
> 3 Para - 3rd Battalion Parachute Regiment. One of the two Parachute battalions that makes up the core of 16 Air Assault Brigade, Britain's elite rapid-deployment Army force (aka the UK's answer to the US Army Rangers). 16 Close Support Medical Regiment is the RAMC group permanently attached to the 16 Air Assault Brigade.  
> Platoon - a military group consisting of 25-50 soldiers, who subdivide into smaller teams called sections.  
> Operation Achilles - largest NATO op of the war, held in early 2007 to reclaim Helmand Province from Taliban.

John woke up to find the sleeping area nearly deserted. Only one of his team’s surgeons was there; a medium-sized fellow with a pianist’s hands who went by the moniker of ‘Magic.’ His real name was Colin Brownlowe, and the nickname had nothing to do with medicine. He was the best poker player John had ever met till he’d moved into Baker Street.

Not that he’d ever seen Sherlock play poker. But one could imagine.

John had one booted foot braced on the frame of his cot, lacing it up, when the fussiness of Magic’s movements wormed its way through his preoccupation. He let his arms drop around his knee in favour of studying his teammate. ”You never said you’d been stepping out.”

It came out without John really thinking about it, a normal sort of comment to a mate who was fixing himself up, but Magic nearly leapt out of his skin.

“What?”

“You’re off out to meet a bird.” John frowned thoughtfully at his collar and cuffs. “You’re taking it seriously.” This was new. Magic had never said anything to them the first time through. Or at least John certainly hadn’t been in the know.

Magic’s eyes twitched like he expected spies to sneak up and make off with him. “I, uh, don’t...what do you mean?”

John had forgotten what a stupefyingly poor liar the other surgeon was when he wasn’t playing cards. He pointed obligingly. “You pressed your shirt, creased your collar, buffed your boots, and did you tweeze your eyebrows? ‘Cos they look a little less like they’re thinking of crawling off your face than usual.” And then he blinked. That had sounded like...when had he begun picking that up?

The sagging look of shock that came over Magic’s face was just as familiar. Pleasure and shame warred for pride of place in John’s mind for a moment, till Magic sidled closer to loom over him sheepishly. “Yeah. Hum. I... Look, Johnny, could you keep this on the QT? You know how sticky it can get dating in the ranks, but...I think this may be the real thing. I can’t just let it blow over without giving it a shot.”

John pursed his lips and then nodded. Whatever he had on, Magic had been a consummate professional about it the first go ‘round. Privately he nursed a little candle flame of sorrow for the man, because whatever this was, if it had worked...would eventually work? Brilliant, he could see tenses were going to become an issue. At any rate, he suspected they’d have heard about it if Magic had ever met with success.

It was, John mused later over his roast beef and potatoes, a very strange thing to realize he had begun to sound like his flatmate, who may or may not actually exist. It was even stranger to think that he had absorbed bits of a technique that might possibly never have had a man to invent them.

It worked, however he’d learned it. What did that say about its reality?

He stabbed at his potatoes as vengefully as if they were his rogue thoughts. This whole thing was bollocks. What he needed was a benchmark. Specifically, Sherlock. John had learned how to survive a lot. He’d lost everything he’d wanted in life and rebuilt himself from scratch before. He’d do it again if he had to. 2007, 2010, Army, London, he could start over anywhere, so long as he knew whether to expect a crazed fop-haired genius in his life, or if he’d have to settle for having him only in dreams.

He wasn’t sure how, exactly, but if that was all he could have, he’d find a way to make it work.

Complication: assuming he existed, Sherlock was half a world away in London, doing whatever he’d been doing in 2007 in whatever places he’d been doing it. Even if John could simply pick up and swan off to the City (which he couldn’t), he had about as much chance of finding the man as he did of finding bin Laden. He had to try another way.

A tray clacked down on the dining table across from him. “You realize that fork’s been hanging in the air for five minutes now and you’re yet to take a bite,” Bill’s gravelly voice greeted him. “The food isn’t _that_ scary.”

Bill had a way of crinkling his eyes when he smiled that made it impossible not to smile back. He was his own little chunk of solid reality thumping down in the seat across the table, and John’s breath caught on how much he’d missed his old friend. “And you’ve been watching me and counting out the seconds, have you? I could find you some work to do if you’ve got that kind of free time.”

“Oh, snappish. Glad to see a bit of that bad humour’s still in there. Was starting to think we’d lost you to jumpiness and thousand yard stares.”

John snorted. “You make it sound like…” Well. He _did_ have PTSD, though he hadn’t, at the time. The first time, that was. Now. Never mind. By way of changing the subject, he reached over and stole some potatoes off Bill’s plate.

“Oi! Getcher own, mate!”

“Mine have gone cold.” He ate them with a show of relish. “Mmm. That delicious flavour of belonging to someone else.” Words Sherlock lived by, he thought with a smirk, and went for more, dodging the savage flurry of fork-stabs that ensued.

“Anything on when you get off duty?” Bill asked, once John had yielded the field of battle.

John’s mouth opened to make an excuse, but nothing came out. It had been too long since he’d had to beg off going out with army buddies; the civvie dodges that came to mind didn’t apply here. Bill’s grin expanded in proportion to the length and awkwardness of the growing pause. John finally surrendered to the inevitable. “Ah...no.”

Inside, he was cursing. He’d been coming off strange enough, lately. No chance Bill hadn’t caught this one. He let it slide, but John had an intuition this wasn’t the end of it. “Great. Want to hit the watering hole with me around 1900?”

John didn’t, really. Heroes Bar was a social hub of the camp. Everyone spent off hours there, mingling companionably amongst the rowdy packs of fellow soldiers whose hooting, laughing, gossiping, and puppyish roughhousing made John feel suddenly, ridiculously old. It’d only been a year ago—so to speak—that he’d been one of them, a little older than most but as ready to laugh and horse around as anyone. Hell, he’d been (in)famous for the quality of his downtime.

He’d never really analyzed just how much that bullet had changed him. The John Watson he’d been up till the day he’d got shot wouldn’t have recognized the John Watson who’d sat up from a London hospital if he’d seen him in a mirror. Now, he found, there was no going backwards again.

But here was Bill, with that teasing grin that twitched at the corners of his mouth like it was threatening to eat his face. A man would be a fool to say no to spending a few more hours of his life with one of his favourite people in the world. “Yeah, alright,” John agreed at last, with the same grudging grin the big man had pulled out of him earlier. “I’ll meet you there, shall I?”

“Sounds like a plan, Doc.” Bill stood and clapped one slab of a hand on John’s shoulder.

John watched him stroll toward the rubbish bins with that strong-legged gait that made him look like he could kick a Royal Marine’s arse. In two weeks, they’d be chunking along through the Afghan desert, and Bill would be sneezing like a hyena from all the dust, heading north with the 3 Para platoon they were attached to for the kickoff of Operation Achilles. They wouldn’t have reliable access to civilian communications for two months; he needed to get this thing with Sherlock sorted before that.

If all went well, he’d have it done in two days. There was nothing to be done about it tonight, though, which left him with naught better to do than to shove through a sea of sweaty bodies, trying not to spill the pint in his hand while he strained to spot Bill through the crowd of improbably young, strapping, _tall_ soldiers.

Young, loud, energetically milling soldiers. _Brothers in arms,_ he reminded himself, but couldn’t forget that meant they were warriors trained to violence. He caught himself twitching at sudden movements on his periphery and suppressing his flinches when someone barked a laugh too close behind him. He was keying up, he could feel it, and did his best to force it back with iron control over his breathing while he pushed through the swarm.

When he met Bill’s eyes through a break in the mountain range of 20-somethings, he knew his jumpiness had been noted and filed. He could recognize the affable scrutiny of a medical professional when it was turned on him.

John was already braced for the talk when he finally popped out from between two NCOs to drop next to his friend on the bench. Bill, bless him, didn’t go straight for the throat. “Been rough lately, hasn’t it?”

True. With the push to clear Kajaki Dam, there’d been plenty of engagement with the enemy up north. Camp Bastion’s field hospital retained the middling cases and stabilized the worst before they got airlifted home to England. It kept John’s team in surgery for long hours on an irregular basis.

Not, of course, that this was relevant to the issue. “Yeah,” John agreed neutrally.

Bill sat, relaxed, chin tilted curiously. John wondered what he was seeing. His inner Sherlock reared up again. _Military bearing, but the spit-shine’s worn off. A bit sallow under the tan, slumped a little from exhaustion. Emotional, not physical, though admittedly sleep has been sparse. Faint psychosomatic limp._ Really? He frowned and rewound the sense memory of his movements through the crowd. Bloody hell, he _had_ been favouring his leg. Automatically he turned attention to his left hand which, yes, betrayed a slight tremor in the glass of beer he was holding.

His shoulder was aces. He hadn’t even been wounded yet. This was...he knew what this was. Same as it had always been. They were talismans, proof that his old life hadn’t passed him by without leaving some trace in him.

It was just a different old life, now. Sort of.

“Johnny?” Bill asked softly. “Alright, old son?” John turned his head, and was startled by the depth of concern—no, he almost looked _afraid_ —in Bill’s face. “Only you’ve been...different this past week. A bit odd, like.”

Christ. Odd didn’t cover it, though, did it? How different must he seem? Not just his preoccupation, or his failed excuses over lunch, or his twitchiness in the crowd. He’d withdrawn compared to the gregarious John Watson his teammates were used to. He could feel the walls he’d put up between himself and his friends, but he couldn’t bring himself to pull them down and open up like he’d been used to. Couldn’t afford that kind of honesty, even if he’d wanted to. Then there was that little show with Magic, and yesterday he’d startled Dick by snapping at him for singing along to his mp3 player. He _liked_ Dick’s music; sometimes he even joined in. He just couldn’t listen to “Take Me Out” without memories of Moriarty and the pool scrolling like music videos in his head.

From his speech patterns to his sense of humour, John had changed so much in his past three years that he should count himself lucky if Bill wasn’t considering the possibility of alien clones.

Jesus, but he felt alone. He stared into Bill’s worry-creased features and tried not to let it show. “Yeah,” he finally said again. “You’re right. I have.” He swallowed. “Listen, Bill. I just...I need you to trust me, alright? Something came up, but I can’t explain it. Everything’s okay in the ways that matter,” a lie from John’s angle, but not from Bill’s, “but I’m waiting on an important bit of news.”

He felt like a wanker, holding out like this on the man who would save his life. But there was no explaining it without sounding certifiable before he even knew whether he _was_ certifiable.

But Bill wasn’t stupid. More to the point, a chronic mother hen like him could hardly miss the signs of someone else fretting over people. “Is it...Harry?”

“No, no, Harry’s as right as she ever is. It’s...” Hell. How was he meant to describe Sherlock? _The man who brought me back to life. That chunk of myself I spent the first 35 years of my life looking for without knowing it. A hallucination I can’t live without._ “A friend,” he finished lamely.

Bill’s eyes widened. Curse the perceptive bastard. He’d just heard everything John hadn’t said, hadn’t he? “I didn’t know you had someone like that, John.”

And what the hell was he meant to say to that? John gave up and simply shrugged. “Could be I’ll let you know about that by the end of the week.”

It was as good an explanation as any, really, and honest enough in its own way, but the look of ferocious support Bill turned on him threw him off enough that he nearly reared backwards off the bench in surprise when Bill flopped a big dark hand down on his head in wordless allegiance. He ruffled John’s hair like a schoolboy, and then concentrated on drinking his beer without saying another word.

John bent his face into his own glass, to hide the hot prickling in his eyes.

Being on rotation for time online didn’t exempt a man from waiting on queue. Poor as the connection was, the computers were in such high demand that John seldom bothered to claim his turn when it came up. He had no one back home he was yearning to talk to, and he still got most of his news from the papers and the television. Around base, gossip tended to be more informative anyway.

In this case, however, it was the best research tool he had access to. He had 30 minutes. If God didn’t hate him (a bet he wouldn’t take, at this point), his first stop would be all he needed. The fallback plan was to dig up any phone numbers he could find for the Metropolitan Police and spend his weekly phone call convincing someone to patch him through to DI Lestrade. Assuming _Lestrade_ existed.

What would happen, he wondered, if he Googled Mycroft Holmes? Probably it’d be one way to find out the truth. In the interests of not ending up in an undisclosed detention site, however, he pushed that option to the bottom of the list.

Instead he typed in “science of deduction.

And there it was.

Dear god. Remind him to mock Sherlock about that background. His first attempt at web design had been...enthusiastic.

No address listed. John jotted down the phone number, then signed off the computer and walked out, as coolly as if his entire body weren’t racked with tremors.

Sherlock was real.

Sherlock was real.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For those who likey the researchy:
> 
> I'm placing John (and Bill, Dick, Magic, and the rest of their crew) in the [16 Close Support Medical Regiment](http://www.paradata.org.uk/units/16-close-support-medical-regiment-ramc-0), which is permanently embedded as part of 16 Air Assault Brigade.
> 
> All members of 16 Air Assault Brigade, including the medical regiment, are parachute-trained, which means that, yes, John and his friends are badass air assault army medics. They get dropped right into the action along with the rest of their parachuting compatriots. Take a look at the [Pre-Parachute Selection Course](http://www.eliteukforces.info/parachute-regiment/p-company/), and then consider that marathon parkour run across London in ASiP, when Sherlock and John were only passingly winded by the time they got back to 221B. Makes more sense now, doesn't it? (Of course it doesn't provide an explanation for Sherlock, but then he's _Sherlock_ and doesn't really need one.)
> 
> I am fudging the timelines a bit. 16 Air Assault Brigade was among the first groups deployed to Afghanistan, but as far as I can tell, they pulled out a couple of months before Operation Achilles got kicked off. But it’s fiction, and I'm the author, so I get to invoke artistic license.


	6. Chapter 6

The violin was crying for mercy by the time Lestrade came knocking. Sherlock saw no reason to bestir himself. The inspector had the spare key. Not that Sherlock had _given_ it to him, but he hadn’t raised too much stink since the arrangement came in handy when he wanted to hear from Lestrade without letting him think he was welcome.

Lestrade stopped in the threshold. “Jesus wept! This place looks like a bomb hit it. You have another break-in you didn’t tell me about?”

Sherlock lowered the violin and followed Lestrade’s gaze.

It was true. The flat was a wrecking zone. Emptied from their filing boxes, papers migrated slowly across the room in cellulose snow drifts. Swept off the shelves, books formed precarious architectures protruding from the papers. Over in the sleeping alcove, Sherlock’s clothes hung limply from dresser drawers, the bed had been stripped, and his shoes had been pitched around the room. The furniture looked like someone had been at it with knives. Fresh scores decorated the sides of his bookcases, the legs and underside of the kitchen table, which had been tipped on its side, and the back of one oak chair.

The kitchen area was best written off as a no-man’s land.

“I did it,” Sherlock finally said, when Lestrade’s dogged, hopeless attempts to deduce the scene began to grate at his brain. Of course, now he’d wonder—yes, there went his eyes, flicking predictably down to Sherlock’s arm—what Sherlock had been shooting up with lately. Sherlock rolled his eyes. Let him. The only task more laborious than explaining how this disaster derived from a painstaking search for clues to his situation would be explaining that he hadn’t cleaned it up simply because he liked it better this way.

At least this mess belonged to _him_. This flat hadn’t changed a whit and yet it wasn’t his at all. His shoes pinched his feet in places they hadn’t when he’d last worn them. His clothes and bedsheets smelled subtly off. The expectations of his acquaintances were their expectations of a Sherlock who had, somewhere along the way, ceased to be.

In the past three days, he’d toppled one hypothesis after another. Late-night forays into Lestrade’s and Stamford’s offices had turned up nary a discrepancy. The wreckage of his own flat served as proof that even the stains on his papers and the wood grains on the bloody furniture matched parameters. Not to mention the traces of drugs in his own bloodstream. He’d run those tests yesterday, and found the results particularly interesting seeing as he’d last flirted with cocaine before he’d met John.

The handful of possibilities that remained to him were all so repugnantly unsavoury that he’d spared a precious day to brood over them.

He’d had a drug trip so spectacular that it had altered his personality. He was suffering a psychotic break. Or he was entirely sane...the logical corollary to which was that John had died alone in 2010 of a bomb Sherlock had detonated.

He lifted his violin back to his shoulder and resumed playing. “What do you want, Lestrade?” He suspected he sounded as leaden as he felt, and could hardly bring himself to care.

Sherlock could have brayed like a donkey for all Lestrade noticed. He jerked around when addressed, insensibly grateful to be pulled from his contemplation of the kitchen’s dread mysteries. “Kidnapping. Woman disappeared out of a Tesco’s while her husband was right there.”

Sherlock stopped playing. A cold like fouled river water trickled down his spine. Lestrade smirked into his stare, no doubt convinced that his little mystery had its hooks into Sherlock’s curiosity. If only. “Rupert Stiles and his wife Betsy. Owns his own business, which is faltering, and fears the kidnappers’ intent is to level a ransom he can’t pay.” If it had the lilt of a question, that was only because he wished it were one. What it was instead was the final piece of evidence in Sherlock’s personal mystery. The rain of conclusions began in his head, logical sequences clattering to the ground around him as if Lestrade had flicked a domino.

“That’s impossible.” Lestrade kept talking, blind to Sherlock’s internal landscape. They always kept talking. “Here, if you’ve been snooping through my records again-”

“It’s fraud.”

“-What?”

“It’s fraud!” History repeated itself. He knew this case. He’d solved it four years ago. “They’ve faked it. He’s going to burn down his own property.” _Not a spectacular drug trip. Not a psychotic break._ He squeezed his eyes shut, nauseated.

“Yeah, pull the other one,” Lestrade growled. Disgust. He was certain now that Sherlock was high. To be fair, four years ago he’d have been right. “It’s got bells on. I’m glad you found a sense of humour somewhere, Sherlock, but I haven’t got time for arsing about on a kidnapping case. Are you coming or not?”

A hundred sharp-tongued replies rose to Sherlock’s tongue. He bit them all back, because it wasn’t Lestrade they would’ve cut, and flogging himself with his own sarcasm wouldn’t help anything. He settled for setting the violin down on the coffee table. “Yes. I’m coming.”

His uncharacteristic compliance, finally, broke through Lestrade’s obliviousness. He took a single step backwards for the door, eyes sharp with a policeman’s concern. “You alright?”

“Quite alright.” Sherlock could only imagine what showed in his expression, but it made the lines of Lestrade’s face twang in response. “I’ll be along.” He’d never felt less like playing games. _For god’s sake, just go away and leave me in peace for a few minutes._

When Lestrade had cleared the door, Sherlock dropped onto the battered blue sofa and buried his face in his hands.

This was it, then. Four years in his own past. No idea how he’d got here or how this was possible, let alone how to get back. He’d always thought it a wasteful habit to wish things were otherwise than they were, but right now he would’ve given a great deal to live in a universe that accepted bribes.

Fear, Sherlock and John had agreed late one mutually insomniac night, was an irritatingly useless emotion outside of certain narrow, immediately life-threatening parameters. And yet here it was, rising into an astringent clot in his throat. The odds were arrayed so far against them. He’d felt the punch and embrace of the explosion, in that instant before he’d stumbled back over his own sofa. He’d known when he pulled the trigger how poor their chances were.

He gathered up his Strad and cradled it to his chest. His consistent old friend, it was a known quantity in his hands, reassuringly unchanged in its relationship to him. The mere act of taking it from its case had been enough to convince him he wasn’t in the midst of a fever dream. He knew this violin like he knew London, or Mycroft, or John Watson. It was _his_ in every fibre.

Only that wasn’t true, was it? He knew London. He knew Mycroft. He didn’t know John Watson. And John Watson didn’t know him. And John— _his_ John—might very well be dead.

Sherlock took his time getting to the station, for which Lestrade should be grateful, because if he thought he understood the depths of antisocial behaviour of which Sherlock was capable, he would’ve had a rude awakening.

By the time he arrived, interrogations were prepping, and Sherlock had regained enough composure to restrain himself from eviscerating ( _probably_ verbally) anyone who approached him. He claimed a desk by sitting on it, and from his vantage point watched police swarm about him like so many black and white checkered bees. He didn’t give a damn about solving this case—he’d already given Lestrade the answer anyway—but every bit of information he could gather could prove vital in figuring out how to move on from here.

His mind was snapping like a downed high-tension wire. It was a sensation he’d first encountered in those fatal 15 minutes at the pool: not just excited, but _desperate._ Fight-or-flight adrenaline rush; it was normally John’s sort of thrill. Sherlock preferred more cerebral highs, but there was a grubby, primal sort of appeal to it in between the gut-wrenching sense of being cornered. Why did the best mysteries of his life have to keep putting him in untenable positions?

Anderson hadn’t gone out yet, but he was already wearing the change of clothes he kept in his office. In the doghouse with his wife again. Barely a deduction, that; he practically lived there. Coburn, who’d retired in 2009, had slipped on managing his diabetes again. His limbs were pale and twitchy. His grandchildren must have been to visit; he never could resist when they offered to share their sweets with him. Donovan was present, pumping out anxiety like a new form of radiation. Her review must be due. If it went well (it would), Lestrade would recommend her for promotion.

What would happen, Sherlock wondered, if he interfered with that process? The right word in the right ear, and she could conceivably spend the rest of her career as a lowly constable. It might make an illuminating experiment...assuming he cared enough about Donovan to hate her that much. Sherlock frowned at his own train of thought. He knew he had it in him to be cruelly vindictive, but if ruining lives were what got him up in the mornings, he’d have gone into Moriarty’s line of work.

The Sherlock of a mere four years ago wouldn’t have carried out such an act, surely? Had he ever been that cruel? So petty as to destroy someone because he disliked the way they snubbed him? He thought back to college and the circles of kids he’d moved amongst: Sebastian—whom he hadn’t destroyed, though he might have deserved it—and all the rest. He’d used them, they’d used him back, and while it hadn’t always been friendly or even polite, he thought it had been a fair trade.

Lestrade poked his head out the door from the rear area, shoulders sagging with relief when their eyes connected. Interesting. He hadn’t been sure Sherlock would come. Sherlock bounced to his feet and followed him back.

He hadn’t meant to rattle Lestrade, but it turned out to be useful. Even with the Inspector off-balance, it took all Sherlock’s powers of persuasion to win himself a go at the witness. If the witness had a quarter as much conviction, he might’ve gotten away with it. As it was, he held up under pressure with all the tensile strength of wet tissue paper—and with a roughly equivalent amount of weeping.

Doubtless Donovan and her cohort would persist in their wilful obliquity and file this as one more exhibit in their case for his monstrosity. The man was no victim, and Sherlock wasn’t about to sacrifice making his point to Lestrade just because the criminal turned out to be emotional ly delicate.

The first time through, the house had burnt down. Disinclined as he was to rain havoc on Donovan’s inconsequential life, Sherlock still needed to know what would happen if he changed something.

The answer, it turned out, was _nothing._

Once he’d finally convinced the good inspector to listen to him, Lestrade rushed off with a few officers and a call to the utilities company. Half an hour later, they’d found the wife and there was nary a sign of residential explosions, cosmic implosions, or unravelling of carefully crafted illusions, space-time, or sanity. Forensics would never even know how much work he’d saved them.

A house was, in the greater scheme of things, most likely a rather minor change, but the potential was gratifying. On the other hand, Sherlock discovered that knowing the punch line reduced the excitement of solving a case to a gruelling slog of evidence collection. Christ, he had to figure out how to fix this. _Four years_ of being able to predict every case and occurrence that crossed his path? He’d go so insane he’d finally take that job Mycroft kept offering him.

Mycroft. Who had yet to shift his overly generous haunches when Sherlock needed that information more than ever. He’d established that this was reality, which meant John existed, but he was off faffing about somewhere in Afghanistan with no inkling Sherlock even existed. The delay was transparently deliberate. His tetchy brother probably fancied it a petty vengeance for all the little slights Sherlock had delivered upon him over the years. Except that for once Mycroft did not have all the facts, and this was the furthest thing from _minor_.

Naturally, Lestrade chose the worst possible moment to approach. This was beginning to become a bad habit with him. “Walk me through this one more time, will you?” He held out two paper cups like an appeasement offering.

At least the appalling coffee was something to occupy his hands with. He took a sip, and spat it back out. “There’s no sugar in this!”

“You’re wound tight enough as it is.”

Lovely. And now apparently he was being obvious. Should he just write it across his forehead? Sherlock would rather have chewed rusty nails than explain that he had more important things to deal with. Judging by his poorly-closeted concern, Lestrade was already primed to meddle. His involvement could only range from inconvenient to disastrous.

He thunked the offensive coffee down on the appropriated desk, ignoring the tarry mess that sloshed out onto someone’s half-filled statement forms. “I already walked you through it twice. I can’t be blamed if your small mind is incapable of contorting into the necessary logical structures.”

Apparently Sherlock was also too obvious in picking a fight, because Lestrade’s mouth flattened but he killed off his temper with a thoughtful sip of his own coffee; barely drinkable even with sugar, by his grimace. “Look.” The hand he pushed through his hair only enhanced the silvery hedgehog look he was sporting. “Look. I suppose it’s not really my place to bring this up. But. You seem...odd, lately. Even for you. Are you...in any kind of trouble?”

 _No, it’s not your place,_ Sherlock wanted to snap. Starting a fight on that note would’ve been child’s play, but Sherlock would’ve preferred to bite off his own arm than discuss the empty space he could feel looming just past his left shoulder.

“If you were any more wooden, Lestrade, they’d be using you for a sawhorse.” Lestrade was worried. _That_ didn’t jibe with Sherlock’s memory. He recalled occasional rows, and two threats to haul him in for possession, but the emotions driving those had been primarily disgust and exasperation. Then again, three years ago, he would have removed Lestrade’s head for trying to get chummy.

Knowing the man as he now did, he understood that alienating him wouldn’t stop him from getting underfoot if he decided Sherlock needed help. Besides...an evening came back to him, going over records in one of the conference rooms, when John had told a war story that had Lestrade in such stitches he’d spat tea on his paperwork. Sherlock had laughed till he’d nearly tipped his chair over.

He held himself rigid for a moment, then let his shoulders fall, let some of the aggression bleed out. “Let me see your coffee.”

Lestrade frowned, puzzled, but passed it over.

Sherlock drank off half of it, then handed it back. “Yes, much better now.” Lestrade’s gaping shock was so precious that Sherlock couldn’t help grinning. “Any further questions?”

One of the Detective Inspector’s best qualities was that he recognized when he’d got in over his head. “No. I suppose...you’re good then.”

Sherlock watched him beat a prudent retreat. He’d never teased Lestrade before. The man had no defense. As a tactic for fending off meddlesome do-gooders, it was a roaring success; he was a bit startled to find it had the side-effect of lifting his mood.

Or maybe that was the sugar. Either way, it preserved Sherlock from the temptation to violence till he managed to get home.

He opened the door, threw his scarf and coat over the lamp, and discarded all other concerns to the wayside, because there was a manila envelope resting on his sofa.

He knew what it was. Unmarked and thin, it hadn’t been there when he’d left; and of the three people who could access his flat and didn’t want him dead, his landlord wouldn’t leave him an envelope and he’d been with Lestrade.

The contents consisted of three sheets of A4 paper. Not a complete record; a brief summary of a military officer’s current status. Mycroft’s answer in ‘yes or no’ form.

_Captain John H. Watson, Medical Officer, 16 Close Support Medical Regiment, Royal Army Medical Corps  
Currently stationed at Camp Bastion, Helmand Province, Afghanistan  
Due for deployment March 5, 2007, Operation Achilles_

_Real_ , Sherlock’s mind sighed.

But of course he was. That’d already been established. If his next breath came a little easier through the knot around his trachea, it was just maudlin sentimentality. With the documentary evidence in hand, however, Sherlock couldn’t quite bring himself to mind.

It was 02:19 by the mantelplace clock. That made it February 25. Eight days before the British Army sent John off to get lost in the remote hinterlands of a backwater country.

It was enough. Sherlock already knew how to do it. But the question he’d deliberately avoided asking finally forced its way up through his thoughts: What good would it do?

The answer supplied itself just as readily. _None._

It felt like having his chest cracked open. Facts didn’t change because you didn’t like them. Denying them was a waste of energy. Accepting them cleared the mind of clutter. But just now was a rare insight into the reasons someone might reject them anyway.

He threw the pages down on the sofa, freeing his hands to scrub frantically at his hair while he prowled the room, kicking books and shoes carelessly out of his way. Assuming he made his way to Afghanistan and tracked down a stranger who wore a face he loved, he could...what? Convince him to desert? Follow him around a warzone like a lovesick puppy? Explain that one day, John would be the man to prove that Sherlock Holmes had a heart, not to mention periodically saving his life and warming the abandoned caverns of his self with a companionship Sherlock would freeze to death without?

John didn’t know him. John was a dedicated military man. He wouldn’t be released from service for over two years yet. He was nevertheless still _John_ in his essential core, as perfectly Sherlock’s complement as if he’d been constructed solely for the purpose. Sherlock didn’t doubt he could sway John to choose him over his commission if he put his mind to it. But even if the RAMC accepted his resignation, what would it get them?

A John who was years too young, his life irrevocably altered. A John who might come to regret his choice, who might be stranded with a Sherlock who didn’t know him. Who wouldn’t be shot in 2009 by an insurgent. A John who, if all went as poorly as possible, would know Sherlock for four years instead of one, who might not die in an explosion in 2010.

The pointlessness of it burned through Sherlock like acid, but his bones ached as if they’d had pieces cut out. He’d never believed in emotion over reason, but then he wasn’t the man he’d been before he’d met John Watson.

Eight days, and he knew how to do it. It was idiotic, probably frivolous, unforgivably selfish, and a touch mad even for him, but all he had to do was reconstruct himself circa 2007 within the next six hours.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poor Sherlock. He always misses something. ;)
> 
> FYI for those who’re interested, I'm seeing John as a career officer. This means he's in until he resigns or retires (pre-retirement resignation is not easy; the military doesn't like letting go of its officers).
> 
> British Army tours of duty (i.e. warzone deployment) typically run in six month rotations. Halfway through, you’re given a one-week furlough, which can be rescinded if your superiors decide they need you where you are. You can be put on back-to-back deployments, with a six-week “break” in between (break in the sense that you’re stationed somewhere friendly, rather than in a combat zone, but not necessarily England).
> 
> If John wrapped up med school in his mid- to late-20s, and had enough time to end up—if we go with ACD—a Captain, he probably signed up shortly after he got his medical license. If he was in the military for 5+ years, he would’ve seen multiple tours in Afghanistan/Iraq. It seems reasonable to figure he spent a total of two years of that time in a combat zone. Where he is in his current rotation, I never bothered to figure out because, as you’ll see, it’s not going to matter.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Author’s Note:** I ATEN'T DEAD. If you're wondering what took me so ****ing long (it's okay, I don't blame you), well, I now have a master's degree and John was being goddamn stubborn. Between the two, I did not have time to sit down and kick my way through my own character's rock-hard head. 
> 
> At this time it may be useful to mention that I have absolutely no intention of abandoning this—in many ways this is a story I have wanted to write for years—but I do historically suck at writing fiction in a timely manner. So updates will probably continue to be erratically spaced (though hopefully not to the tune of a couple of months between chapters). While I’m at it, I might as well also note that though the Beeb has jossed me on a few points (wasn’t actually expecting them to mention John’s regiment—curses!), I’m just going to ignore them and run with it.
> 
>  **Beta Credits:** My firstborn child to gelishan, airynothing, mamishka, and hiddenlacuna for helping me beat this monster into submission. I hope you guys don't mind sharing stock in souls.
> 
>  **Glossary for this chapter:**  
>  Fireteam: the basic unit of the modern British (and American) army. It’s comprised of 3-4 soldiers and can work independently or with other fireteams as part of a section.  
> XO: Executive officer, aka second-in-command (also 2IC)  
> CO: Commanding officer  
> ACMT: Annual Combat Marksmanship Test. British troops are tested every year on their skill with firearms.  
> Decocker: Some pistols (like the Sig Sauer P226) have this rather than a safety. Mechanically, they do different things, but for firing purposes, the difference is that you can still fire a gun with a decocker engaged; the trigger just takes more effort to pull, and is therefore theoretically ‘safer.’  
> ATMP: ‘All-Terrain Mobility Platform’ – basically a six-wheeled, all-terrain flatbed truck for trundling people and stuff around.

_John watches the gun sink like the setting sun. Until the last instant, he doesn’t know. Either Sherlock has a plan, or they’re about to die together. It’d be a leap to say he’s content with that, but this will do. Every man has to die._

_The moment is caught in amber. He feels the pull of the trigger as if it’s in his own hand. He sees the explosion blossom. He feels the hot ripple of concussion curl its fingers around his limbs. He sees it catch Sherlock up in its embrace. The curls over his forehead flutter. Their eyes have time to meet._

_This is Moriarty. A man who can unfurl a soul, just to make certain you know the precise value of what he’s destroying. The joke is on him. In a look, Sherlock and John live all the things that could have been between them if they’d been destined to survive this moment. He wins nothing. They take it all._

_And then the abused air screams. It lifts and heaves them. Flesh splatters like the gelled liquid it is. Bones yield. The hot interiors of the body are misplaced. Pain buries him till he can no longer feel it. Buried in the flat paste of concrete dust clogging his throat and the electric scent of tortured metal. The biting, bitter taste of explosion follows him down on the final fall_

into waking.

John jolted hard enough on the landing to bounce him out of his cot. They were set too close together for him to tumble to the floor, so he fell onto Magic instead, who’d been sleeping unsuspectingly to his right. They both hurled themselves up to their knees in a shouting, surprised knot.

About ten men were suddenly upright. Handguns coming to bear crackled in the air like ice, freezing the tableau.

In the silent heartbeats that followed, the tent canvas snapping in the wind brought John back to his senses. The dust and metal taste of Afghanistan lay thick in his mouth, but the pungency in his sinuses was desert heat and male sweat, not a bomb. Not blood. He knew where he was...as much as he ever did these days.

“What the actual _fuck?_ ” That was Prathmesh Ashratnam, their comms man, who stood up with arms on his hips and hair that looked like it’d been hit by lightning. The startled tension shattered at the sound of his voice. Shoulders eased all around the room, guns returned to their resting places, and Magic and John dared to resume breathing.

“Sorry. Sorry,” John apologized to Magic, to everybody. He flopped back onto his cot and threw his arm over his eyes. Hell, as if he needed anything else to worry about. He’d been getting enough strange looks as it was; after shouting the place awake from a nightmare, his CO would have him in for a psych eval by the end of the week.

_Fuck._

It wasn’t as though John needed a psychiatrist to tell him what was wrong with him. His dreams spoke loud and clear every night since he’d got here. One night, Sherlock’s moment of doubt had been right. John had been Moriarty, and he’d watched from a changing cubicle as Sherlock died for a man he believed gave a damn about him. Another night, he’d been with Dickie again, reliving the hit by the IED in Musa Qala—only Dickie had been wearing the bomb instead of driving over it, and another man in their unit had shot and triggered it, hurling them all into oblivion together. He’d looked just like Sherlock.

Those dreams wedged cold and soft under his ribs, waiting till daylight to burble up into his conscious mind. It was like they were fucking with him, popping into his forebrain every time he found a moment to fight with himself over where to go from here.

He had nine days to make up his mind. After that, he’d go to war regardless, but the question was what he planned to come back to.

It was atop an ISO container again, the sun a bloody malformed lump on the horizon and a cold wind picking up across the desert, that John confronted facts. He’d lost Sherlock. They were both good as dead, in the…back home. It was glorious to believe that this was a second chance, but look at him here, tripping over the trailing edges of himself like some sad attempt to haunt his own life. How would trying to wedge himself into a facsimile of his life in London be any different? There was _a_ Sherlock in London. Tantalizingly close he might be, but how could he be the one John knew and loved? And that, the thought of going to Sherlock, only to be confronted by a man who had no room for John…

John had dreamed of standing in an empty 221b, his footsteps echoing off the blank walls. He’d dreamed of standing face-to-face with Sherlock, those x-ray eyes finding nothing to catch on as they looked right through John.

John could have phoned. Could have emailed. Just...not yet.

But since he was obviously going to be losing sleep for the foreseeable future, he volunteered for the graveyard shift. Someone might as well benefit from his buggered up headspace, and with military activity ramping up in the northern foothills, they had more injured men incoming at all hours. He discovered that he hadn’t lost his ability to differentiate between makes of helicopter in the dark.

The idling double rotors of a Chinook thumped against the night air and echoed off the walls of John’s chest cavity as he kept pace with the gurneys coming in from the landing area. “Three men incoming from a fire fight in Kanzay,” recited the flight paramedic, briefly jogging alongside. “One concussion with damage to the eyes; one with extensive lacerations; one bullet wound, shattered femur.”

The fireteam had been just outside the lethal radius of an improvised grenade. Ugly things; terrorists liked to pack them with dirt and animal dung to maximize the chances of infection for survivors. John helped wheel the backboarded concussion victim into place in the ward while he evaluated him. He’d been facing the explosion, from the looks of it; in one of life’s weird miracles, the flak had all but missed him.

The team leader had caught enough for both of them. ‘Extensive lacerations’ didn’t begin to cover it. It was a marvel the medic had stopped him bleeding out on the way in.

Putting him back together took hours. John felt like Doctor Frankenstein, picking out shrapnel and stitching the man back together piece by piece. By the time they finished, his hands were cramping. He pulled off his stained surgical gown, washed up, and headed back out to the ward to check on the other two.

The hospital had fallen into pre-dawn stillness; the quiet hum of medical equipment and sleeping patients dominated the long room. Their gunshot victim was contentedly dead to the world on morphine and antibiotics, blood pressure unsurprisingly low but vitals stable. He’d be fine, though he might become disenchanted with rainy days.

Their concussed private seemed to be sleeping soundly. John studied his face around the bandages protecting his eyes, then flagged down the ward nurse when she stepped out from behind a curtained alcove.

“When did you wake him last?” he asked her.

“About 40 minutes ago, sir. He was coherent.”

John pursed his lips and stared down at their patient. “Put him in for a CT scan.”

The nurse frowned at him. “He was aware,” she repeated doubtfully. “There’s already a backlog on the CT…”

“Do it anyway.” John snagged the man’s chart. Private Cuthbert Pierpont. He wrinkled his nose sympathetically; surgery couldn’t fix that name. “Point me at whoever I’ll need to argue with to make it happen.”

She gave him a look that said clear as words, ‘It’s your funeral,’ and pivoted to stride off, intimidatingly crisp as any parade ground general. John leaned against the wall next to Pierpont’s bed till she was out of sight, and then bent over the bed for a closer examination of his patient—not his injuries, but his features.

He couldn’t explain to the nurse, but he remembered this man. He remembered losing him. John had been working the day shift. He’d been five hours into it, checking on patients in this same ward when Pierpont had coded due to a bleed on his brain and they hadn’t been able to resuscitate.

The idea that he’d felt creeping up on him threw over the slow approach and pounced full-force, threatening to take his knees out from under him. John stiff-armed himself on the frame of Pierpont’s bed, staring down into the sleeping man’s bandaged face. Dear god, what if he _could_ change that? Save this man’s life, change the course of history for a patient he’d already failed. 

Christ. Just how much hubris had he absorbed from Sherlock? But then how could he not _try?_ Try to save a man’s life, try to find out whether people were meant to die at their appointed time or if fate could change.

He was fucking _insane,_ was what. He’d never put much stock in the theory of doctors having god complexes, but apparently time travel turned you into a megalomaniacal nutter. Just what kind of risk was he contemplating, exactly? It wasn’t only poor Pierpont’s fate he’d be taking in hand; this could affect the lives of people he’d never even met!

For a horrible moment, John could all but see the future unspooling around him, a wild tangle of possibilities into which he was proposing to knot his fingers and _rip._ The magnitude of it was a flood tide closing over his head, leaving him awash at the bedside of a helpless young man stretched out and dying slowly before him and...

And John was an idiot.

 _Every_ life he saved came with the same burden. He’d healed villagers he was pretty sure had shot at his fellow soldiers, and probably would again. He’d helped men and women who were, by the law of averages, rapists and child abusers, whose organs could’ve gone to save others if they’d died. This wasn’t different. When he saved a life, he never knew what it would mean for the future. That wasn’t his call to make. So long as his patients were alive, it was his duty to try to keep them that way.

He hung the chart back on its nail, and pulled the blanket more securely up around Pierpont’s chest. Best go find the radiologist and get that argument out of the way.

John’s shift ended before Pierpont’s CT scan was scheduled. John hit the canteen for breakfast and put off dragging his sagging arse to bed till the hospital grapevine informed him that Pierpont was going in for immediate surgery. 

He considered staying up to learn the outcome, but that’d put him at 36 hours with no sleep for no better return than eight extra hours of pacing. He could get something approximating a reasonable night’s sleep in the time the surgery would take. And in the end, it could all be for nothing. He wouldn’t sleep any better if Pierpont died on the table.

Maybe some things were just fixed and John _couldn’t_ change this. He went to sleep imagining how Sherlock would disown him as a flatmate if he knew John were using _Doctor Who_ as a reference text.

John woke up groggy, mouth disgusting and head grotty with exhaustion and hours of feverish, half-aware dreaming. He’d dreamed of Sherlock being shot, his blood pouring hot and thick over them both while John hunched protectively over him, waiting for the final bullet to take him in the shoulder. 

He wolfed down lunch even though his stomach greeted it with all the excitement of digesting cardboard, and hustled back over to the hospital to visit his patient.

Pierpont wasn’t currently much more energetic than cardboard, himself. He lay there, drugged to the gills and breathing deep and slow, head swathed in bandages, surrounded by machines that hissed and beeped John’s success at rewriting history.

John stared down at him, arms crossed over his chest and chin tucked in, and enunciated clearly in his own head, _What in bloody fuck do I do now?_

So much for his ability to predict the future. Hell, he’d probably wrecked a swathe through it long before now without even knowing. A large part of him declared its failure to give a fuck, because the outcome the first time around had been totally unacceptable. Just…it was sodding ironic, wasn’t it, that here he’d been fretting over Sherlock vs. his patients, Afghanistan vs. London, only to discover that he’d been thinking too small, by a factor of approximately a universe.

The problem was that there was a cost to it. He wasn’t stupid, no matter what Sherlock said; he could see what it would mean if he took action. John had places he wanted to go, points in time he wanted to arrive at along with ones he wanted to avoid. If he started changing things—saved lives he’d lost before, or made a concerted effort to keep Sherlock from dying at Moriarty’s hands—he’d be flying blind on what he might be giving up in exchange. Or, for that matter, what price others might be forced to pay for him.

This was going to drive him mad. Trying to hold all the ‘what ifs’ and ‘if thens’ in his head still felt like reaching into water to touch his reflection. Only he was pretty sure he was also on the wrong side of the water. He wasn’t _built_ for this. He couldn’t think this way. Christ, where was Sherlock when he needed him?

Four years in the future, dead in an explosion.

Jesus, he felt so alone. Alone and confused and angry as a rat in a maze where some lab-coated wanker kept switching the exits on him. He needed some goddamned _perspective_ on this and all he could manage was to spin in circles and punch walls. 

When a man was hovering on the edge of fight-or-flight, John had learned, he was best served to give in and run for it before he started breaking things. So John laced up his boots and set out for the four-kilometre pounded-dirt track that ran around the base perimeter. 

It was quiet but not deserted. John wasn’t the only person on base who preferred to exercise outside. At this time of year, the air was just shy of chilly, but John broke into a dead sprint as soon as he reached the track and it wasn’t long before his skin was steaming and the cool air felt blissful. For about one minute, there wasn’t room in his head for anything but the burn in his lungs and the jarring in his legs.

He managed about 300 meters before he had to slow down to a jog, gasping like a landed fish and soaking with sweat. The powdery white dust he’d kicked up mingled with it to coat him in a thin gluey paste till he looked just like the men and women he passed as he ran: animated plaster statues with shining, sweat-carved snail trails of living flesh down their faces and shoulders.

It was better, though. He could lose himself like this, engulfed in his physical body and with the desert yawning away to his left; too big for John to ever leave a mark, able to swallow even his problems without a trace. Immersed in that immensity, John could reach for a bit of objectivity. 

He would never fit here. These weeks of trying to line himself up with a John who’d been younger, saner, _simpler_...of course it was impossible. It was a sham. But no matter how he sorted his options in his head, they settled into three categories, all of which were equally futile. 

It was like fairy tales—the horrible old ones his gran had used to tell when he was a kid, where the fairies were cruel as life and no one ever got to keep what they wanted.

He could go to Sherlock. He could tell the future and everyone in his present life to fuck off, along with everyone he could help here, and run to Sherlock to try to change everything for both of them. He could get three more years with him than they’d had on their first go. Maybe even save their lives. He could hope that the Sherlock he would meet if he went now was a man who could be what John’s Sherlock was. He could hope he wouldn’t fuck up everything for them both.

Or he could stay here. Abandon Sherlock and save his patients. Soldiers, Afghanis, children, all the people he’d failed the first time. Play God. Go slowly mad.

Or stay here and do what he was pretty sure was the ethical thing: try to change as little as possible. Accept that it wasn’t his right to make these decisions, avoid tempting fate with the wrong choice. Stand uselessly aside and lose everything. Again.

He had eight days to decide.

He spent the next two of them bracing for his psych evaluation. Sham it might be, but if he was going to get through his, he needed the comparative sane simplicity of Captain John Watson, RAMC.

 _Captain_ John Watson didn’t have PTSD. He didn’t drive himself crazy pondering questions his little mind wasn’t equipped to comprehend. He didn’t dream every night of explosions and blood and choking on sand that turned to water when he vomited it out and burning need in his chest that his last sight not be of sly, mirror-bright eyes turning to empty glass, and he didn’t wake up shouting, chasing the threads of how he could fix it.

Captain Watson knew his duty, had no question where he belonged, had never heard of a glorious madman named Sherlock Holmes. John did his best to unearth his old self from the sedimentary layers of memory and re-inhabit him, grabbing for that man’s calm core to avoid being diagnosed as delusional and, if he was lucky, to find a stable point in the chaos of his mind so he could get a chance to pull it together.

He felt like he was profiling himself: working 12 hour shifts, exercising his lungs raw, playing poker with his teammates in their few hours of free time, and exhausting himself till he could sleep like a coma patient. The cramming method of studying for dissociative personality disorder. It left him feeling like he was standing about two inches out of alignment with his skin, puppeteering his own mind and body. Workouts were the only time when he actually fit into his own space, when everything else was subsumed in the labour of bones and muscles.

But he noticed the subtle tension beginning to fade from his teammates’ shoulders when they stood near him. That was...something. It meant he wasn’t radiating crazy. It meant he was faking it successfully, and he wasn’t sure how to feel about that. Sometimes it helped him feel a little more normal.

His hand was on the doorknob of the psychiatrist’s office when the thought struck him that he could deliberately throw this. Get himself diagnosed, sent home, discharged. 

It might be the responsible thing to do. Five days till mission launch. They were already packing up their gear, and he was proposing to go into battle with his head tied up like a pretzel. It was stupid, and he knew it. But the thought of bailing out tasted like failure, when he could still _help_ here. To hell with everything else, these men were still his teammates. He still had his duty to do by them.

Besides, if he went out on a medical discharge, they’d inevitably want to know the details, and he wasn’t that good a liar. He wouldn’t be diagnosed with PTSD, he’d be diagnosed as schizophrenic. He’d probably end up sectioned.

He took a breath, shook his shoulders out and pulled open the door. 

The psychiatrist didn’t waste time. Busy woman; of course she was. Who wasn’t? She moved them right through a review of John’s history. Yes, alcoholism ran in his family. No, he’d never been a heavy drinker himself. Yes, he’d had some trouble with gambling in his youth. No, he hadn’t indulged since he signed up for the military, wait, unless…did his Friday poker games count?

No, it transpired, they did not.

And then to the point. Her crap standard-issue chair groaned when she sat forward in it to put her elbows on her desk. “Let’s talk about the nightmare, John. What was it about?”

He’d spent time on figuring out how to explain it to someone without context. “I dreamed of people I care for, getting caught in a bomb. Civilians. From back home.”

She nodded, entirely unsurprised. Now he thought about it, it sounded positively commonplace. “Are nightmares common for you?”

“No.” They hadn’t been, at the time. This time. Before. He visualized a thumb and squashed that bit of mental babble.

“Have you been under unusual stress lately?”

He gave her an ironic head-tilt. It was such a bad habit; rude, really. “My unit is deploying in six days. I’ve been dealing with increasing cases of battle trauma as action ramps up.” _I recently died in a bomb blast. With my best friend, who I might be in love with. And his arch-villain. By the way, I’m a time traveller. Shut up, John._ “I’ve got a…relationship. Back in London. Which turns out to be maybe more than I realized.” 

His brain only caught up to the significance of that little catch in his voice after the words were out, his throat tightening uselessly as though it could pull them back.

_Oh, Jesus, Sherlock._

He was grieving. He had been since he’d got here. How had he never noticed? His chest burned as though admitting it made it real. It took every bit of stoicism he could scrape up to keep his expression from giving him away.

“And that’s what bothers you.”

He gave in to the urge to rub his hands over his face. No point in pretending he wasn’t agitated, and oh god, he needed just a few seconds to himself. “I don’t have much time,” he told her when he dropped them back in his lap. “In six days I’ll be out of touch, under fire, and that…” He tamped down the grief with a firm inhale and tried to anchor the oncoming lie in it. “It makes you realize where you are. That there’s a chance of not coming back. Not getting to-” His larynx ached from forcing his voice to stay even, and he wasn’t managing to lie at all, was he. “That you may never even get to touch them.”

The psychiatrist sat silently for a few beats, absorbing what he’d just told her. Or maybe demonstrating her respect for his emotions; some kind of psychotherapist’s customer service code. “So you’re feeling your mortality,” she summarized.

The laugh erupted before he could stop it, because that, _that_ was the essence of black comedy. “Not mine, no.”

Then he cursed internally at her predatory head-tilt. Catching her attention was the opposite of what he wanted. “Not yours?” Analysis flickered in her eyes, lightning-fast. John wished fiercely it were Sherlock sitting across from him. “Is she unwell? At risk?”

He let the gender assumption slide. The last thing he needed was more questions, and anyway she was right, wasn’t she, in the ways that mattered? Besides, as free as he officially was to have a male partner, he had no illusions about the unofficial blowback if that one got out. “Let’s say that I’ve known people with safer lifestyles.”

“Really.” She raised an eyebrow. “How so?”

“Not my story to tell.” Let her assume that this fictional girlfriend was a drug addict, stunt performer, police officer, or government spy; it was all the same to him. She’d be at least partially right on all counts.

But it didn’t all quite jibe. His reactions were off, and she could sense it as well as he could. He watched the wheels turn behind her eyes as she shuffled the facts around, searching for the point of failure in this self-portrait he’d sketched.

He opened his mouth and words started coming out. “It’s hard,” he began, “being the one who waits. I’m used to…” What? He was used to _this._ To being present, in the action, able to _do something._ “I’m not good at…” No, fuck, wait, where was he going with this? A cane, a limp, and months in a bedsit so bland he’d felt it driving him slowly insane. And then craziness and running and the amazing, vibrant feeling of a smoking gun in his hand and a live madman, staring in wonder. _Shut_ up, _John._ But her eyes were fixed on him, and he didn’t dare leave it hanging. He admitted lamely, “I’m not good at being useless.”

God, he felt pathetic saying it. He felt useless, right now. His ribs ached from caging all the things he’d swallowed down, and he felt horrifically exposed. _Out_ suddenly became a priority. “Are we done here?”

She nodded, recognizing his discomfort. “Just about.” After a few more notes in her book, she snapped it closed and met his eyes. “Based on this interview, I’d judge you fit for service, Captain. But I want to ensure that you understand the dangers of your situation. Your history shows a number of escalating risk factors for PTSD…”

Her spiel on stress management faded into the wallpaper while he choked on the ridiculous, _stupid_ injustice of it all.

Christ, Sherlock. _We died._ John had lost him and he hadn’t even met him yet. He had no idea how to mourn this.

And he’d wondered why he couldn’t think straight. 

He’d got over childish ideas about the universe’s fairness when his mum died. Life kept moving even if you stopped, and John had a decision to make, whether or not he was ready to. He supposed he had the psychiatrist to thank. At least now he knew where he was coming from.

The next day (T minus four) found him at the firing range. When he needed to think, guns forced him to focus. There was no room to lose track of a loaded gun in his hands: where it was pointed, how he handled it, who was in the line of fire. 

Taking out a clip’s worth of his frustrations on a painted plank kept his mind from chasing itself in circles, but he wasn’t convinced that this was better. Every shot jarred through his diaphragm like a sob, and the sensation kicked up the cloud of grief around him. He couldn’t decide whether it was cathartic or just miserable.

The trigger clicked on an empty chamber, and John dropped out of firing stance.

“You’re the only Marksman in the RAMC, John,” Bill said from behind him. “Do you really need the practice?”

John sucked in a startled breath, fumbled and caught the magazine he was ejecting before it hit the dirt, and then breathed out again in a long stream. “She cleared me.” He was so sodding sick of dodging and pretending, and it was worst with Bill. He felt like he was kicking a puppy that’d offered to help him with his math homework. He pocketed the mag and drove in a full one.

“So does that mean you’re alright, then?”

John huffed, cycled the slide, and fired three times.

He’d never quite realized before how much Bill’s voice reminded him of Sherlock’s. They both had that quality of filling a space. But Bill’s voice held the warmth of a cup of coffee and a blanket. Sherlock had only ever come over that comforting when he was being manipulative. 

John fired twice more, breathing through the hard clench of his lungs and the kick of the recoil, before he had to lower the gun and engage the decocker, mortified at how close he suddenly was to falling apart in public.

He held still, eyes fixed on his gun, trying to get himself back under wraps. There’d been a time when he might have been a little all right with falling apart in front of Bill, but he’d learned to be alone since then. Another one of the things he’d found he couldn’t go back on.

When he’d pulled it back together enough to pay attention, he found Bill in the middle of talking, unfazed by the near-miss with emotionalism. “-Didn’t hear a word if you want.” His mouth quirked. “Just tell me why the planks need to die, John.”

John choked, caught between a sob and a laugh, and started coughing on it. Christ. What he’d give to be able to. He shook his head helplessly. “It’s complicated.”

“I’m smarter than I look.”

John turned to face him. Bill raised an eyebrow, as if he thought John actually were surveying how smart he looked. Stood there, like a bloody pillar of strength inviting John to lean on him. Also, desperately failing to feign casual with how he was blocking the exit to the shooting stall.

John couldn’t stop himself from giggling. “You look like you’re suffering with rheumatism.” 

Bill snapped upright and rumbled sheepishly, with something that might’ve been a blush on his dark cheeks, but his feet stayed planted. John sighed. He was going to regret this, but he was too fucking tired to care. He held out the Sig to Bill. “Fine. Practice.”

Bill stared down at the thing like John was force-feeding him avocados. That hangdog expression dredged up another, only slightly hysterical snicker from John. He hefted the gun a little, keeping its barrel pointed down-range. “Come on. You need it or they’ll drum you out at your next ACMT. You shoot and I’ll talk.”

There was a day next year when Bill being a better shot could save at least one life, along with a little piece of his friend’s soul. That alone made this worth doing. And…selfish as it was, John was going off his chump keeping it all to himself.

“I dreamed of an explosion,” he admitted, once Bill took the gun and scuffed his feet into position. “Don’t lock your elbows.”

“Stress dream,” Bill observed. _Pop!_ Handguns did not sound terribly impressive in the open air.

“Yeah.” No wonder Sherlock found it so easy to lie. When you knew so much more than the next bloke, you could tell the truth with impunity.

“Who was exploding?” Bill fidgeted a little, concentrating on his stance far more intently than it really needed.

“You know who.” _Pop pop pop!_ John squinted against the afternoon glare. “Not bad.”

“You cannot possibly see from here. And yeah, well, I don’t. That’s the whole point, isn’t it?” Bill glowered sideways over his bicep.

John dipped his head a bit in acknowledgement. He’d promised to explain about his ‘friend’ last week, but he never had. That said enough, really. He sure as hell couldn’t manage it now. He sucked in his cheeks and chewed on their inner lining while he shoved away his last glimpse of Sherlock, fringe ruffling over his eyebrows before the blast picked them up and threw them. “What’s your greatest regret, Bill?”

Bill straightened warily and lowered the gun. “Missing my little girl’s first two years.” He twisted towards John to assess him, his big frame looming a bit in the small space.

When he got worried, Bill had a way of shuffling in towards people like a massive dog trying to crowd them into feeling better. John’s stomach twinged with guilt. Bill had been worrying for a while now, and John had let him. “If you had the chance,” he began, searching for a way to say it that wouldn’t sound alarming, “if you could go back and change things in your life, go a different route, would you risk it?"

He hadn’t succeeded, from the way Bill’s lips thinned, but his eyes went distant. “I’ve got my regrets, John, but they’re nothing I can’t live with. The life I’ve got now…it’s not perfect, but nothing ever is.” He shook his head, focussing back on John. “Bugger, you’ve got me spouting cliches. I save lives, Johnny. I’m blessed to be surrounded with the best people a man could know. If making my mistakes helped me to get here, I can live with them.”

A hot flash swept through John at those words. He held his hand out for the gun. Bill hesitated for a second, then handed it over.

John swept the Sig over one-handed to unload five rounds in a cluster in the plank’s ‘heart.’

It was just a piece of wood, but killing it did make him feel a little better.

“What if you couldn’t live with it?”

“Then I reckon I’d do what I had to do.” Shoulders gone tight, Bill held his hand out for the gun. John passed the weapon over. Bill’s attempt hit the chest area two times out of five. John waved at him to keep going; he wasn’t sure Bill would give the gun back if he asked for it. “John…”

John shook his head at him. “If I left the military, people I could save would die.”

Bill sucked in his breath. “If you left the military…?” He looked down at the gun in his hands and went silent. Bill fell into himself sometimes, when he went deep in thought, but John could follow along from the way those big hands fiddled with the Sig. He ejected the magazine, emptied the chamber and stood for a long moment with the cartridge clenched in his fist. 

Finally he reloaded the gun he’d just emptied. “I imagine...some would die that you might’ve saved. And probably others would live that you would’ve lost.” He fixed John with a scrutinizing stare. “That’s how it works, mate. We all make mistakes. We just make different ones. You’re a good doctor, John, but you’re not God.”

John laughed under his breath. Too right. “If I don’t leave the military,” he murmured, trying the words on, “people I could save would die.”

Bill engulfed John’s left shoulder in one hand. “That’s not what I mean!” 

John wanted to tell him it wasn’t what he meant either, but what he really meant was Sherlock, so he said nothing. 

Bill kept his grip on John’s shoulder, studying him with a tense confusion that made John’s heart clench. _Watson, you selfish git._ Couldn’t keep his mouth shut and now he’d gone and scared the shit out of the poor man. He watched a parade of replies pass and die unspoken on Bill’s face before he settled for, “Thinking of clocking out on us? I had you for a career man.”

John smiled sadly. “So did I.” The one thing he couldn’t have no matter which choice he made. But at least he could ease the damage he’d done here. “How do you deal with having two lives, Bill? When they both need you in different places?”

Bill’s shoulders heaved in a heavy sigh, visibly relieved at finally getting some context that didn’t sound like the rough draft of a suicide note. “I married a saint.”

John gave a startled bark of a laugh. “Yeah, well. That won’t be an issue for me.” He gestured to have his gun back, secured it and slipped it back into its holster. “Practice your shooting, Bill. Where we’re going, you’ll need it.” With a parting clap to the back, he left his puzzled friend behind him.

Trauma medicine had an element of timelessness to it. Once you’d seen enough injured bodies, the times and places all began to blend together. His shifts came as a bit of a relief, considering. That evening, John leaned over a young soldier in the ward, probing at the wound encompassing his leg while the boy—God, had John ever been that young?—watched his hands with eyes the size of teacups.

They were so bloody stoic, these kids, and so afraid.

The examination was mainly for the lad’s benefit. The diagnosis had come to John at a glance, but patients didn’t find the Sherlock approach to medicine terribly comforting. He ignored the pang that hit whenever he thought of the man, tidily folding down the sterile bandage and granting the soldier a crooked smile. “I have good news and bad news.”

The soldier—Corporal Mark Potts—went stiff.

“I should be able to save your leg.” John watched anxiety drain out of the young man with a certain detached sympathy. He remembered that. The inexpressible relief of _You’ll live. You’ll be whole._ When Potts tensed again at what he saw in John’s face, John continued gently, “The bad news is, there’s no possibility of you staying in the service.”

Potts hollowed out before his eyes. Yeah, John remembered that, too. He studied the young man, suffering in his hospital bed, and dug after something useful to say. All he’d wanted to hear when it’d been his turn was, “Whoops, sorry, had that wrong.”

“You’ve got people waiting for you, right?” he finally asked.

Mark nodded.

“Then heal,” John told him. “Work for it, for them. And when you’re better, find the thing you can do and throw yourself at it. Don’t let anything hold you back.”

Mark frowned, confused. Fair enough; John sounded more like a guidance counsellor than a doctor just now. “You’re not useless,” he insisted anyway, with more force than he could justify. “The Army’s not the only thing you’re meant for. There’s something else out there that needs you.”

It must seem to be coming out of nowhere, he supposed, watching the uncertain furrow deepen between Mark’s eyebrows. But it was true, and maybe something to keep on with through the platitudes they spoon-fed recovering patients.

John nodded farewell and peeled off the nitrile gloves on his way to the next patient, tracking them blankly on their arc towards the biohazard bin. He’d been like Mark. Once upon a time, this life had been all he’d ever wanted for himself. He’d never thought of himself as lucky, but he really, really was. But how much good luck could a man receive? How many reasons to live could he count on finding?

Three days to mobilization, and the base was swarming with 2,000 troops, 600 vehicles, and a field hospital in the midst of preparations to move out over the next three days; a quarter of the base’s resources and personnel, moved in slowly over the past four months for this very purpose, and deploying in the space of a week.

John’s own platoon was packing their vehicles with equipment and supplies. In three days, they’d light out cross-country to the north, heading for what would turn out to be some of the bloodiest fighting of the war. And John would be with them.

He had to face the fact that he’d lost Sherlock. No matter how much it hurt, if John interfered with his life now, then Sherlock would never become the man John knew. John wouldn’t— _couldn’t_ —be that selfish.

He couldn’t be so selfish as to abandon his people here for the sake of his own hurt feelings. People like Pierpont and Potts, he could help them now, and there was nothing he could do for Sherlock yet except intrude.

He’d find a way to deal with Moriarty. He had a couple of years to think about it, after all.

John jounced into the heliport on the back of an ATMP, along with a few of the lads from his platoon. The place was a tightly leashed catastrophe. Support helicopters kept up a perpetual sandstorm, coming in and out on supply runs. Crew and maintenance personnel scurried about, bent low out to stay clear of idly spinning blades. A miniature mountain range of crates and containers had formed along the east side of the flat area, over whose peaks and valleys Logistics Corpsmen clambered on their endless quest to help soldiers locate the supplies and ammunition they needed.

On the west side, a convoy of three Chinooks was spitting out their shipment of supplies and Royal Engineers. The ATMP trundled over towards it; John followed the lead of the Logistics Specialists he’d come out with, and leapt off the back before it even stopped. Their Sergeant went jogging over to the man supervising the unloading, while the Lance Corporal started poking his nose around the containers. Since John was along to help with the medical supplies, he tagged along.

Hopper, the LC, elbowed him and pointed. “Doc, check it out.” The incoming troops had cleared out enough to reveal the knot of out-of-place men standing near the loading ramp of the third Chinook stand out. “What’s a fuckin’ SAS colonel doin’ running escort duty?”

John rubbed at his watering eyes—fucking dust—and peered at them. An SAS colonel and two non-coms, two men wearing civilian clothes that were so nondescript they could only be secret service, and another civilian who anything but nondescript.

He arrested John’s eye: tall and dark-haired in civilian clothes and body armour, he was obviously the colonel’s charge. He was arguing, pulled up to his full height and making sharp, darting gestures. For a moment, while the man paused and listened to something the officer was telling him, John thought, _God, he looks so much like..._

That silhouette. The storkish elegance. The arrogance.

“Sherlock!” John shouted before he knew what he was doing.

The dark-haired man snapped around. For all of one second, he hovered in place—triangulating—and then he was moving, crashing in John’s direction like a storm surge. 

_It is. It_ is. _What the fuck is he doing here? Oh Christ, he’s goddamned glorious._

And then Sherlock was standing a foot away, looming right down at him, eyes blazing, wide, brighter and sharper than John had ever seen him. Slashing at his lungs. John couldn’t breathe.

“You know who I am.”

Oh fuck. No. Bloody buggering _fuck._ He wasn’t meant to balls it up like this! Hadn’t he just been telling himself he was better than this? The Sherlock in John’s mind started speaking half a breath before the real one. _How do you know who I-_

“ _John?_ ”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **Notes:**  
>  Fun gun facts!  
> 1: The gun we see John (and Sherlock) using in the show is a Sig Sauer P226. While the Browning L9A1 (aka the Browning Hi-Power) is still standard issue in the British Army, the Sig P226 has been issued to some units, including paratroopers, which includes members of 16 Air Assault Brigade and their associated groups. (In other words, John’s unit.) However, the two guns do have a very similar profile. So when Moriarty calls it a Browning, either 1: the writers got it wrong, 2: Moriarty got it wrong, 3: Moriarty was mouthing off and didn’t care, or 4: we’re supposed to pretend the Sig is a Browning because they didn’t want to buy too many props.
> 
> Well, I find it interesting anyway. ^_^
> 
> 2: British troops take the Annual Combat Firearms Test every year, to check their proficiency with firearms. Those who score the highest are awarded the Marksman rating in recognition of their skill. Mainly this means they get a nifty badge they can wear, but it also means that if a team needs somebody on the sniper rifle and they don’t have an actual, y’know, _sniper_ handy, the Marksman is likely to be asked to fill in. Ordinarily, medical personnel don’t fight except in defense of themselves or their patients, but at satellite bases, they _do_ stand guard duty and take shifts on patrol. Given his facility with guns, it’s quite possible that John found himself in this position a couple of times.
> 
> 3: I have no idea how many Marksmen there are in the RAMC, and neither does Bill. There probably aren’t many, but he was deliberately spouting crap.
> 
> 4: It’s not against the laws of war for medics to fight or bear arms. Medics are given special protection under the Geneva Conventions so long as they abide by certain requirements. Essentially, it’s a crime to target medical personnel if they are wearing the red cross symbol and maintaining a non-aggressive profile—i.e. staying out of combat except in defense of self, patients, or medical supplies. But if they take off the red armlet, then they are free to act as regular military, and to be treated as such.
> 
> Of course it’s moot in Afghanistan. The Geneva Conventions only legally apply between fellow signatories—even if most signatories consider it the decent thing to apply it to all enemies—and you can bet that guerrilla fighters have not signed, and won’t be holding to the Conventions even if you do. In fact, in a situation like Afghanistan, wearing the armband can make medical personnel _more_ of a target, so sometimes they ditch it (though it does also signify to allies where to find help, so it can still be useful).


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many many thanks to [Teahigh](http://archiveofourown.org/users/teahigh/pseuds/teahigh) and [Lifeonmars](http://archiveofourown.org/users/lifeonmars/pseuds/lifeonmars) for their beta assistance and sanity management.
> 
> I TOLD YOU THIS BASTARD WASN'T DEAD.

“A favour,” Mycroft repeated as though the words were new to history. He spun his umbrella on its point. “Twice in one week. Are you quite certain you’ve contracted no terminal illnesses I should know about?”

Sherlock deflected the sarcasm with a curl of his lip. Mycroft was being facetious, of course, but then again he wasn’t. Beneath the cynical suspicion lurked honest concern, which put Sherlock on thin ice. For Mycroft, suspicion was workaday. Worry might actually stir him off his arse.

As that was the one thing Sherlock couldn’t afford, he cloaked himself in all the exasperated distaste he could summon up for Mycroft, and admitted readily, “I need to go to a warzone.”

“No.” The word popped out. Mycroft’s brows furrowed in shock in its wake. 

Sherlock wasn’t sure whether his brother was surprised by the request or by being driven to speak before he thought. Either way, he absently chalked up a point to himself on his mental scorecard, and pushed himself up out of his chair. “Fine, then.” 

It was a calculated move, but not a bluff. If Mycroft decided to stand behind his refusal, then Sherlock would find some other way to get himself onto an army base in Afghanistan. If he couldn’t get there in time to find John, he’d do whatever it took to learn where he’d gone and follow after him if he had to.

But then again, Mycroft knew from experience that Sherlock giving in that easily after such an outrageous request meant that he had alternatives, which in turn meant that asking Mycroft for help was most likely more a courtesy—a _concession_ , in Sherlock’s opinion—than a need. So he wasn’t surprised when Mycroft, eyes fluttering closed in pain, lifted his fingers and said, “Wait.”

Sherlock dropped back into his chair. He suspected he looked smug. He certainly felt smug. “Assign me to a case at Camp Bastion,” he began eagerly. “I’ll be an MoD consultant, it’ll give me all the leverage I need and you’ll get your repayment into the bargain. I’m sure you’ve got at least three problems out there that you could use me on, and in my free time I’ll deal with my own concerns.”

Mycroft’s face had gone blank under the onslaught of words. Even Sherlock couldn’t read him. “And your case is?”

“Watson, of course.” Sherlock flicked his fingers dismissively. There was as little point in trying to hide Sherlock’s aim as there was in Mycroft’s even asking. He already knew what Sherlock was interested in. “I need to find out if he’s really who he is on paper.” It wasn’t even a lie, in the strictest sense.

Another moment of perfect stillness from his brother, and then Mycroft dipped his chin fractionally. “An excellent plan.”

Sherlock let himself preen a bit. He’d combed through every detail and possible iteration of this talk last night. Everything Mycroft needed to see and believe, everything Sherlock needed to be in order to convincingly portray his younger self: brash, reckless, arrogant and utterly self-absorbed, craving his casework with a fanatical fervour more powerful than drug addiction. God, he’d been an arse at this age, but the illusion was flawless, everything he needed in order to get what he wanted here.

“I have a second condition,” Mycroft said to his cuticles. Sherlock let the annoyed resignation show. He’d foreseen this, too: a second concession, probably of a more personal nature, since it was, after all, a _massive_ favour and Mycroft was nothing if not obsessed with keeping Sherlock in one piece.

He’d been prepared for everything, in fact, except for Mycroft to say, “Tell me why you care so much about John Watson.”

It was less than a heartbeat of freezing up. One fatal blink, and then he realized that of course Mycroft didn’t mean it like _that_ , but it was too late. His all-seeing brother’s features were already slackening in shock.

Damn it. _Fuck._ If Mycroft stood in his way, Sherlock would lose everything. In the breaths between the dawning realization in Mycroft’s eyes and the hardening of his jawline, Sherlock’s mind flew as fast as it ever had in his life.

“Sherlock.” Mycroft’s eyes were mercilessly clear. “Tell me the truth.”

Sherlock drew in a deep breath and began to talk.

***

The transport plane was loud and boring. The casefiles Mycroft had thrown together for him had kept him occupied for almost an hour, and the men and women around him had distracted him for perhaps another; while tediously predictable as individuals for the most part, en masse they _had_ furnished him with some useful insights into the military mind. Inevitably, though, his mind eventually strayed back to the subject of John.

For all his preparation, there was so much about this situation beyond Sherlock’s ability to predict. He was off his home turf in an unfamiliar country, dealing with an organization infamous for its insularity and talent for throwing up obstacles. Not to mention the factor of John himself; they had changed so much from the men who properly belonged to 2007. How would he react to being known by a seemingly total stranger? Should Sherlock pretend not to know him? Would John even _like_ him?

Not trying, though, was unthinkable. This case: arms inventory going unaccounted for. Surely John would want to help? No matter what else may hold true about him, John’s moral compass was unwavering. He’d never say no to a bit of bringing criminals to justice. Three days would be more than enough time to settle the question, and once they’d solved a case together, broken the ice...

Sherlock shook his head at himself, lips pressed against his teeth. He knew better than to base his hopes on emotional twaddle, no matter how appealing an argument ‘because it’s John’ might sound to him.

***

In Kandahar, Sherlock switched vehicles, got velcroed into body armour, and acquired an escort of an SAS Colonel and two members of MI-6 who knew his name, assignment and ulterior motive. “Oh, good,” he drawled at the taller one. “I was worried Mycroft had let me go off without a babysitter.”

The shorter one’s mouth twitched. “No, sir. He wanted us to assure you that you’ll be well looked-after.”

Sherlock narrowed his eyes at her and privately vowed to deduce how each of their first romantic relationships had failed.

Sherlock had visited Kabul once, cradled in the foothills of the Himalayas up north. The landscapes there were magnificent; dizzying vertical extravagances of blue, green and white. The southern deserts, in comparison, were nothing to write home about. He disembarked from what felt like the inside of a giant flying maraca onto the landing pads at Camp Bastion to find himself standing in a fishbowl of molten white sky, row upon row of Conex containers whose riot of bright colours had all faded to drab yellowish tones under the dust, and the smell of rubbish incinerators and burnt motor oil hanging in the air. A thin veneer of orange dust coated everything that slowed down long enough to give it an opportunity.

Which, in fairness, excluded quite a bit. The tarmac was in bedlam, built up into a miniature city of shipping crates, vehicles that would’ve chewed up the streets of London for breakfast, and swarms of people mostly wearing desert camouflage, shouting like auctioneers around the miniature mountains of cargo.

The Colonel pulled Sherlock aside, out of the path of traffic, to start pointing things out to him. Sherlock listened to the rundown of layout and procedure with half an ear. The chaos around him was far more informative. He filed away the jargon words he heard, and memorized the networks of unofficial deference laid bare by the observation of who yielded to whom in their mad dashes.

“...Escorted if you need to move between buildings—”

Sherlock’s attention bounced back. “What?”

“It’s procedure, sir.” The Colonel met his displeasure stonily.

“And precisely how am I meant to do my job with a parade following me everywhere I go?” Sherlock snapped. “It’s going to be hard enough getting straight answers out of the people I need to talk to. Do you think they’re going to greet me with gifts of flowers and self-incriminating information?”

“Keen on lone wolf encounters with criminals armed and trained to fight like pitbulls, are you?” the Colonel drawled. He jerked a thumb at the two Royal Military Police, and then at the Secret Service agents. “This lot’ll take you anywhere you need to go that you’ve got clearance for, and this lot’s got clearance for anywhere you need to go. Between them, Mr Holmes is reasonably confident that you’ll manage not to get yourself shot. If you’d do us all the service,” he added with a dryness that sucked the little remaining humidity out of the air around them.

Sherlock’s mouth was shaping a retort when he heard his name shouted. 

He didn’t deliberately turn; he was simply pointed abruptly in the other direction. 

And there, one foot up on a box to give himself a better view, fair hair glinting in the sun, was the only man in Afghanistan who could possibly have reason to shout Sherlock’s first name. Sherlock was aware of moving closer because the hand that lifted to shade John’s eyes grew in detail. The way his foot came down off the box to plant firmly on the ground. The five or so different expressions that managed to occupy his face at once, flowing in the silent, impossibly expressive language of John’s features, every line and wrinkle forming a phrase for Sherlock to read.

He was close enough to smell John’s sweat when he froze, vibrating, on the realization that his next action if he allowed himself to take it would be to grab John and crush him close till Sherlock could feel every bone and muscle and thought in his body.

“You know who I am.” Impossible. Ridiculous. Unlikely to the point of magical thinking. That this... _time travel_ had happened once was unbelievable; to allow himself to believe it might have happened _twice_ — _“John?”_

Stunned recognition in eyes so familiar, wide and well-bottom blue. They blinked, once—Sherlock came humiliatingly close to making a protest—and then his arms filled gloriously with John, flinging himself at Sherlock’s chest with a choked-off sound.

“ _My_ John,” the words rang exultant in Sherlock’s head, or maybe out loud, he didn’t give a damn. He just held on tight as life and rocked the living, breathing, moving body in his arms. “ _My_ John.”

“Sherlock,” John whispered into his shoulder, squeezing back just as tight. If his voice was suspiciously thick, Sherlock would never tell.

“I guess you two know each other, then?” somebody else said nearby.

He could have _killed_ whomever spoke as John lunged back out of Sherlock’s arms so fast that Sherlock nearly fell over.

They’d accumulated a crowd during their little display. The gathering included Sherlock’s escort and a few people wearing patches that matched John’s, standing in a semi-circle, watching with varying arrays of impatience, confusion, and amusement.

“Hopper!” Visibly pulling himself together, John addressed the Lance Corporal wearing a Logistics insignia. “This is Sherlock Holmes.” He turned back to Sherlock, eyes still wide with shock. “He’s...an old friend.”

The man apparently knew John well enough to detect the shaken tone in his voice despite the background clamour of their setting. Sherlock met the man’s curious glance with a challenging stare that chased some of the amusement off his face. The Lance Corporal promptly looked back to John. “Enthusiastic mode of greeting you got there, Doc. You think he was dead or something?”

John’s throat bobbed in a swallow, features setting into a hard discomfort that had the Lance Corporal drawing back a bit more in wary respect. “Yeah. Actually, yeah. I did.”

“Heartwarming as this is,” the Colonel broke in, eyes flicking between them all with a cooler, more professional kind of curiosity, “Mr Holmes, you’ve got a schedule to keep.”

Jaw jumping, John spun in the man’s direction to snap off a salute and then pivoted back to Sherlock almost before the Colonel had returned it. It was as though they’d got snagged on each other. John seemed no more able—or maybe inclined—to move or look away than Sherlock. 

He looked a little different. His hair was bleached to a brighter gold by the Afghan sun, face and hands tanned tawny, his eyes a polished blue in the bright light, as though the desert had infused him with colour that London had sucked away. A thin layer of the ubiquitous dust settled into the crevices of his face, exaggerating his lines and wrinkles; but it looked good on him, not so much older as handsomely weathered. It was his glow that did it, a core of satisfied contentment that Sherlock had only seen in brief flashes in their time together.

Sherlock coveted it with a fierce and sudden jealousy. That sun-kissed look of belonging should be his to put on John’s face.

The last time he saw this man, an explosion had been ripping them apart. John knew him— _his John_ —and now Sherlock was expected to just let him walk off again? When his entire body prickled with the desire to tug him close and tuck him under an arm so Sherlock could never lose him again?

John held his head cocked to the side, watching Sherlock’s face with the same fascinated intensity he’d worn constantly for their first few weeks of acquaintance. Sherlock wondered what he was seeing, and what invisible signal made his lips twitch and began to rouse him from their mutual hypnosis. He pulled his discipline back on like a uniform, something sad—regret? apology?—softening his eyes. “I’m off shift at 2030,” he said. “You’ll find me at the cookhouse. Sir.” He aimed another salute in the Colonel’s direction. At the man’s nod, he and his friend turned and headed off toward a waiting cargo vehicle. John’s shoulders were rock-hard the entire way, struggling against the impulse to turn around.

Sherlock knew the feeling. He watched John go, teeth gritted, the urge to chase him down a physical pressure between his shoulder blades. It wouldn’t get them anywhere. He drew as deep a breath as he could manage without inhaling a lungful of silt kicked up from yet another helicopter taking off, and turned back to his escort. “Well, there’s no point in standing here until we melt.”

***

Her Majesty’s Army had invented Hell, and wallpapered it with impenetrable PowerPoint slides. It was well past 2030 when Sherlock finally escaped; he refused to use a term as inaccurate as ‘briefing’ for that interminable nightmare. Seven hours of presentations and lectures when all the time, the thing that _mattered_ was less than a kilometer away, doing his patriotic duty in the hospital.

John had said he’d thought Sherlock was dead. It caught like a hook in Sherlock’s chest, because he knew precisely what John meant. For all he’d spent much of his life alone, he’d never conceived of a loneliness like the knowledge that there was a John Watson in the world, but that when Sherlock found him, he’d know nothing of all they’d shared and done together.

While the British Army had been doing its best to extinguish his cognitive ability, Sherlock had tuned out the droning and used the time to evaluate. John knowing him would simplify matters, which was a good thing considering the bulk of his first day had just been wasted.

He was running so late that he wondered if John would still be waiting for him by the time he reached the canteen. He couldn’t afford to waste more time trying to find John again when, between John’s duties and Sherlock’s task here, they had only a matter of hours as it was.

But when he arrived at the canteen, there was John, sitting at an aggressively utilitarian plastic table he’d obviously chosen for its line of sight to the door. When he caught sight of Sherlock, he dropped his feet from the chair he’d propped them on and stood to come to him.

He looked far more composed than he had that morning on the landing pads, though a fragile quality still haunted the corners of his eyes. Sherlock could sympathize; John’s presence ached like a wound that had just been stitched closed. When he curled his fingers around John’s elbow, giving in to his own urge to touch and affirm, he felt a little of the tension drain from both their bodies.

John tipped his face up to meet Sherlock’s eyes. “I thought you’d died,” he said again, his voice light and vibrant with aching undercurrents.

Such a simple statement, to express so much. In the face of that, of this unexpected restoration of John into Sherlock’s life, the only adequate response Sherlock could find was, “So did I.”

He watched John’s lashes veil his eyes as his chin dropped; modesty or, more likely, emotion, John’s interior privacy pulling closed like a curtain. John half-turned to glance around the dining hall. “This is a rubbish spot for this.”

Sherlock cocked an eyebrow in agreement. The canteen wasn’t packed, but it was populated enough to grate when he wanted nothing more than to have John all to himself somewhere private, and it resonated with an irritating hum of conversation that interfered with any attempt at quiet conversation. 

John tugged on Sherlock’s arm. “Come on. I know a better place.”

The base was well-lit, and still alive with people even after sundown. Sherlock followed John along gravel-paved lanes lined by tents and shipping containers, paying close attention to note the details that kept every direction from looking identical. Walls of gabions and cement blocks lay at random, meant to channel traffic or to offer shelter in the event of an attack. They lent the base a rat-maze air, but John moved with confidence, sure of his path and lacking the residual lopsidedness that his gait had held ever since Sherlock had met him.

They stopped when they reached a converted green ISO container that looked nearly identical to all the containers around it. John opened the door and followed Sherlock inside.

“Belongs to one of the engineers.” John leaned against a workbench and waved vaguely at the stacks of file boxes and battered tables. “He’s up near Kabul, doing something with the Germans.”

Sherlock rounded on him. “I don’t care!” After all this, John was spouting inanities? Sherlock crowded him, ignoring the familiar reproachful purse of John’s lips. “You’re _here._ ” His hands had drifted, of their own volition, up near John’s face. Sherlock flexed his fingers, resisting the urge to touch.

So much time, so much _thinking_ , and now all he wanted to do was push the sensation of _having John back_ into John’s brain with his fingertips. John didn’t know what Sherlock’s last few weeks had been like without him. What the absence of him felt like. What _needing_ him felt like.

John’s stupid, startled face was turned up toward him, eyes wide and unsuspecting of the bone-deep ache he could settle in Sherlock’s body, and Sherlock infuriatingly had no words. This man had reduced him to knotting his fingers into fists by John’s shoulders and repeating like some idiot parrot, “You’re _here._ ”

The crinkling collapse of John’s features was poetry; the mathematical beauty of crumpling paper. His hands came up to cradle Sherlock’s wrists.

“Do you know what happened?” John asked at last, eyes dark and solemn. “How this happened?”

Sherlock shook his head. “Theoretical physics isn’t a field I’ve ever had any interest in. I haven’t the least idea how it happened, and even less how to fix it.”

John’s hands tightened on Sherlock’s as he drew in on himself. “I don’t know if I want to fix it. We died, Sherlock. Didn’t we? I remember... I felt it.”

Concussion like the angry hand of gravity, the first sting of flaying shrapnel... That they were standing here was impossible. That they were standing here together could almost force Sherlock to revisit the idea of an afterlife. If there were such a thing, if he had in any way earned acknowledgement from the universe, this was as good as anything he might have asked for. He squeezed his eyes shut, and shook memories and fantasies both out of his head.

When he opened them again, John was regarding him with a quiet sorrow. “Sherlock, you can’t stay here.”

Sherlock huffed a laugh. “I’m not planning to, John.” He raked hair out of his eyes. The release of a week’s worth of tension left him feeling hollow with exhaustion. He threw John a tired grin, acutely glad for his presence. “Convincing you was going to be the hard part. I just need to clear up this inventory issue for Mycroft and then we can go home.”

John rocked back a little, hands sliding from Sherlock’s. “Just that easy, eh?” Sherlock twitched his head in confusion, but the lines in John’s face only engraved themselves deeper. “You’re here now, and that’s the important thing? And I’ll just pick up and leave my entire life here, shall I? Saunter casually out of the military?”

Sherlock jerked his head back. “Don’t be ridiculous, why on _earth_ would you want to stay here?”

“Because these are my people, Sherlock!” The words rang trapped in the metal walls in the ensuing stillness. Sherlock felt frozen into statuary, unable to look away from the wounded anger shimmering in John’s eyes. He drew in breath to speak, then blew it out again when the angle of John’s chin rose challengingly.

“These are _my men,_ ” John added when he saw Sherlock wasn’t going to speak. “It’s my duty to protect them, to heal them, to save them. Do you think I can just walk away from that? Have I ever struck you as that sort of person?”

“And shall I go home empty-handed?” Sherlock snapped. _Am I easier to walk away from?_ He choked that down; he had his pride, he wasn’t going to _beg._ He closed in on John, crowding him back against the workbench, and forced down the claustrophobic panic clawing at his throat. Three years of his life relived; three years alone, in an ill-fitting life that belonged, for all intents and purposes, to another man. He’d go mad. “Do you have any conception what I’ve gone through to get you back?”

“Get me back.” Unperturbed by being cornered into a cup of Sherlock’s personal space, John leaned back on his hands in order to meet Sherlock’s eyes. “You thought I was-” He stopped and pressed his fingers against the bridge of his nose. “You thought the same thing I did, didn’t you? You came all this way to, to persuade me...” His tongue flickered out over his lips. “What did you think you were going to do?”

Sherlock cocked his head impatiently. “What was I going to do, John, wait for three years and hope that nothing had altered in the interim enough to preclude our meeting?” John was here to get shot. He’d nearly died the first time, and he was a different man now; like hell was Sherlock going to wait around to learn the outcome the second time through.

John’s chin came up, a hot spark of anger in his blue eyes. “Don’t make it sound like I’m the irrational one. You just traipsed into a warzone to find me, Sherlock!”

“Is that what you would have wanted?” Sherlock sneered over John’s interruption. “To go through life, never even knowing that we’d missed each other?” 

John stiff-armed him backwards. Sherlock staggered over a metal folding chair and caught himself on the opposite desk. “You prat! You know what else I wouldn’t want? For you to wander into a warzone and get shot, looking for me!”

“What _do_ you want, then, John?” Sherlock kicked the bloody chair out of the way, and then drew himself up to turn the full force of his glare on John. “What do you think you can do here?”

“I.” As though he’d punctured a balloon, the tension drained from John’s body in a deep sigh. He rubbed his hands over his face. “I have things to do here.” He sounded small, reluctant. “I save people’s lives, Sherlock.”

“You save mine.” The words were out before Sherlock even knew he was thinking them.

John looked stricken. “What do you want from me?” he whispered.

He’d misread. That wasn’t anger in John’s eyes; not when it caught and ached in Sherlock’s throat like this. John squared his shoulders when Sherlock took a step toward him, visibly bracing for another round. Sherlock shook his head. “I don’t want you to die.”

Still watching him with those dark, deep eyes, John bit his lip, hurt transmuting into thoughtful sorrow. No. No. Sherlock knew that face. “I’m not leaving without you,” he snapped before John could open his mouth to say the deadly thing Sherlock could see waiting on his tongue.

The terrible resignation vanished in a puff of irritated astonishment. “What, you’re planning to just follow me about Afghanistan? Don’t be ridiculous, Sherlock, you can’t just...”

But John knew better. Sherlock could do anything if he was determined enough. When he saw that realization flit through John’s eyes, Sherlock stepped in closer and took hold of John’s collar. “I’m not leaving you.”

Twice now he’d faced John’s loss—once when he’d felt the explosion consume them, when at least he’d thought they were going together, and again for the past three weeks in London. Not again. He’d do anything it took. “There’s nothing in this world for me except you,” he muttered at the top of John’s head, and then met his eyes as John’s head snapped up. Taking it wrong; he could see John misinterpreting it, face going soft and shattered and achingly earnest, but that was alright, Sherlock could mean it that way too, as John came up on tiptoe and pulled Sherlock down to him till their mouths met, caught, then tangled together into a union of warmth, breath, need.

Sherlock’s hands tightened on John’s collar and waist, just to make sure he didn’t get any foolish ideas about going anywhere.


End file.
